Demonstrating how race is socially constructed has been a core sociological objective, yet
many individuals continue to hold essentialist and other concepts of what races are and how …

American racism is alive and well. In this essay, we amass a large body of classic and
contemporary research across multiple areas of psychology (eg, cognitive, developmental …

A hallmark of human cognition is the capacity to think about observable experience in ways
that are nonobvious—from scientific concepts (genes, molecules) to everyday …

Decades of research suggest that learning styles, or the belief that people learn better when
they receive instruction in their dominant way of learning, may be one of the most pervasive …

Abstract Representations of social categories help us make sense of the social world,
supporting predictions and explanations about groups and individuals. In an experiment …

To make accurate causal inferences about social-group inequalities, people must consider
structural causes. Structural causes are a distinct type of extrinsic cause—they are stable …

Many theories of kind representation suggest that people posit internal, essence-like factors
that underlie kind membership and explain properties of category members. Across three …

Gender‐nonconforming children face a substantial amount of prejudice, making it important
to investigate potential contributing factors. In a correlational study of 253 US Midwestern …

Social essentialism consists of the commonly held belief that certain ways of categorizing
people (eg, gender and race) reflect meaningful, fundamental distinctions found in nature …

Children and adults view many characteristics in an essentialist way—as innate, immutable,
and biological. Prior work has typically investigated essentialism regarding broad domains …