Essentialist Beliefs About Personality and Their Implications

Abstract

Two studies examine implicit theories about the nature of personality characteristics, asking whether they are understood as underlying essences. Consistent with the hypothesis, essentialist beliefs about personality formed a coherent and replicable set. Personality characteristics differed systematically in the extent to which they were judged to be discrete, biologically based, immutable, informative, consistent across situations, and deeply inherent within the person. In Study 1, the extent to which characteristics were essentialized was positively associated with their perceived desirability, prevalence, and emotionality. In Study 2, essentialized characteristics were judged to be particularly important for defining people's identity, for forming impressions of people, and for communicating about a third person. The findings indicate that people understand some personality attributes in an essentialist fashion, that these attributes are taken to be valued elements of a shared human nature, and that they are particularly central to social identity and judgment.

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Personality and Social Psychology
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DOI: 10.1177/0146167204271182
2004 30: 1661Pers Soc Psychol Bull
Nick Haslam, Brock Bastian and Melanie Bissett
Essentialist Beliefs about Personality and Their Implications
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10.1177/0146167204271182PERSONALITY AND SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY BULLETINHaslam et al. / ESSENTIALISM AND PERSONALITY
Essentialist Beliefs About Personality
and Their Implications
Nick Haslam
Brock Bastian
Melanie Bissett
University of Melbourne, Australia
Two studies examine implicit theories about the nature of per-
sonality characteristics, asking whether they are understood as
underlying essences. Consistent with the hypothesis, essentialist
beliefs about personality formed a coherent and replicable set.
Personality characteristics differed systematically in the extent to
which they were judged to be discrete, biologically based, immuta-
ble, informative, consistent across situations, and deeply inher-
ent within the person. In Study 1, the extent to which characteris-
tics were essentialized was positively associated with their
perceived desirability, prevalence, and emotionality. In Study 2,
essentialized characteristics were judged to be particularly impor-
tant for defining people’s identity, for forming impressions of
people, and for communicating about a third person. The find-
ings indicate that people understand some personality attributes
in an essentialist fashion, that these attributes are taken to be
valued elements of a shared human nature, and that they are
particularly central to social identity and judgment.
Keywords: essentialism; personality; traits; human nature
Psychologists have recently begun to examine lay-
people’s beliefs about the nature of social categories. A
growing body of theory and research indicates that some
categories are understood in an “essentialist” manner,
such that a fixed, underlying essence is attributed to
their members. This essence, whose nature is often only
dimly understood, is believed to determine the identity
of category members, to render them all fundamentally
alike, and to allow many inferences to be drawn about
them. Essentialist beliefs have been documented in
methodologically diverse studies of ethnicity (Gil-White,
2001), race (Hirschfeld, 1996; Verkuyten, 2003), gender
(Mahalingam, 2003), religion (Boyer, 1993), disease
(Keil, Levin, Richman, & Gutheil, 1999), and mental
disorder (Haslam & Ernst, 2002).
Several broad conclusions can be drawn from this
work. First, essentialist beliefs form a coherent set that
captures perceived differences between social categories
(Haslam, Rothschild, & Ernst, 2000) and individual
differences in perceptions of particular categories
(Haslam, Rothschild, & Ernst, 2002). Although theorists
often conceptualize the elements of this set differently,
these elements include beliefs in the immutability, natu-
ralness, homogeneity, informativeness (inductive poten-
tial), inherence, and discreteness of social categories.
Second, essentialist thinking is usually theorized to be
negative in its implications. Rothbart and Taylor (1992)
argued that viewing social categories as essentialized
“natural kinds” is a dangerous misapprehension that
accentuates group differences. Allport (1954) described
the ascription of essences to outgroups as a basic compo-
nent of prejudice, and Yzerbyt, Rocher, and Schadron
(1997) presented it as a way in which unequal social ar-
rangements are legitimated and naturalized. Essentialist
beliefs are associated with some forms of prejudice
(Haslam et al., 2002), and Leyens et al. (2000, 2001) have
shown that essentialized outgroups are often “infra-
humanized,” denied distinctively human emotions that
are readily attributed to ingroup members.
Most social psychological research on essentialist beliefs
addresses social categories. Personality characteristics—
differences between people of a different kind—have
been almost completely neglected. At first blush, these
characteristics might seem unlikely candidates for
1661
Authors’ Note: Correspondence concerning this article should be
addressed to Nick Haslam, Department of Psychology, University of
Melbourne, Parkville VIC 3010, Australia; e-mail: nhaslam@unimelb.
edu.au.
PSPB, Vol. 30 No. 12, December 2004 1661-1673
DOI: 10.1177/0146167204271182
© 2004 by the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, Inc.
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essentialist understandings. They are usually under-
stood as personal attributes rather than social identities,
represented as adjectival descriptors rather than noun
categories, and rarely serve as bases for social organiza-
tion or discrimination. Nevertheless, personality theo-
rists commonly discuss traits as if they were essences, as
Millon and Davis’s (1996) definition illustrates:
Personality is...acomplex pattern of deeply embedded psy-
chological characteristics that are largely non-conscious
and not easily altered, expressing themselves automatically
in almost every facet of functioning.Intrinsic and pervasive,
these traits emerge from a complicated matrix of bio-
logical dispositions and experiential learnings. (p. 4, italics
added)
This definition resonates with several of the beliefs iden-
tified by writers on psychological essentialism: Personal-
ity characteristics are described as deeply rooted and
intrinsic, substantially fixed, inductively potent, and at
least partly rooted in biological nature.
Millon and Davis’s (1996) scientific view of person-
ality is widely shared among trait psychologists. In this
view, traits are powerful sources of consistency (cross-
situational homogeneity), stability (immutability), and,
hence, predictability (informativeness) in behavior.
Often these attributes are also understood to have bio-
logical underpinnings and to be universal. Proponents
of the five-factor model, for example, have distinguished
between these “basic tendencies”—viewed as highly sta-
ble, primarily genetic in origin, and largely immune to
culture and individual experience—and “characteristic
adaptations,” such as values, that are more malleable,
contextual, and culturally conditioned (McCrae &
Costa, 1999). Others have framed the same distinction in
a plainly essentialist fashion, distinguishing deeply
rooted “core” from “surface” attributes (Asendorpf &
van Aken, 2003). Indeed, the only essentialist belief that
does not feature prominently in scientific conceptions
of personality is discreteness, as traits are usually under-
stood as continuous dimensions rather than bounded
“types” (Haslam, 2003; Meehl, 1992).
This essentialist view of traits has not gone unchal-
lenged, and critiques of trait psychology have a decid-
edly antiessentialist flavor. The inherence of personality
characteristics has been challenged by writers who see
traits as mere labels, social constructions, or perceptual
categories used to judge others reputationally (Hogan,
1996) or who conceptualize traits as summaries of ob-
servable acts rather than as reified latent variables (Buss
& Craik, 1983). The consistency (homogeneity) of traits
was one target of Mischel’s (1968) situationist critique,
which also challenges their predictive power (informa-
tiveness). The supposed immutability of personality—
the idea that it is “set like plaster”—has been attacked by
writers (e.g., Srivastava, John, Gosling, & Potter, 2003)
who also take issue with the “biologism” of trait theories.
If the essentialist view of personality has been chal-
lenged and defended within academic personality
psychology—albeit not by that name—it is unclear
whether similarly essentialist beliefs pervade implicit
personality theory. Does the layperson’s folk psychology,
that is, construe personality characteristics as immuta-
ble, informative, discrete, and biologically based entities
that inhere within the person? Research examining this
possibility is scarce, because most research on implicit
personality theory addresses the covariation structure of
personality (e.g., Haslam, Bain, & Neal, 2004) rather
than its ontological status.
Several studies partially remedy this neglect. Semin
and Krahé (1987) found that lay conceptions of person-
ality operated at more than one tier, drawing inferences
between underlying (genotypic) and manifest (pheno-
typic) levels of understanding. Research by Chiu, Hong,
and Dweck (1997) indicates that laypeople hold a view
of personality as enduring and latent dispositions (“lay
dispositionism”). Levy, Stroessner, and Dweck’s (1998)
work on “implicit person theories” shows that people
who hold an “entity theory,” in which personality is taken
to be fixed, tend to favor biological and intrinsic expla-
nations of stereotype content. They also draw trait-based
inferences more rapidly and extensively than their peers
in a way that implies a belief that traits are highly infor-
mative. Heyman and Gelman (2000a) found that young
children hold mixed views on whether traits are innately
determined but judge them to be less heritable than
physical features. Heyman and Gelman (2000b) also
demonstrated that preschool children draw inductive
inferences from personality traits in preference to out-
ward appearance and do so much more strongly when
these traits are ascribed to people rather than dolls. All
of these studies address aspects of essentialist thinking
about personality—particularly inherence, immuta-
bility, naturalness, and informativeness or inductive
potential—but they do not conceptualize these as ele-
ments of a broader essentialist view.
Gelman (1992) first drew attention to essentialist
assumptions in lay conceptions of personality. Comment-
ing on work by Yuill (1992), which theorizes that people
hold a realist view of traits as underlying causal entities
rather than mere descriptive labels, Gelman proposed
that the realist view corresponds to a belief in essences.
Understanding traits as latent causes implies that they
have a nonobvious basis and rich inductive potential,
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which may reflect an extension of a biological view of
essences:
People very likely transfer some of their assumptions
about biological essences to their ideas about traits. For
example, people may assume that traits—like essences—
are innate and biologically based. The environmental
impact on traits and their context sensitivity may be
downplayed; their fixedness may be exaggerated.
(p. 284)
Gelman (2003) subsequently examined essentialist
thinking about personality in a pioneering study in
which undergraduates rated 12 characteristics on items
assessing a variety of beliefs (e.g., in innate predisposi-
tion, genetic basis, biological underpinnings, immuta-
bility, universality). Gelman reported consistent differ-
ences between characteristics in levels of ascribed
essentialism, with “politically conservative” lowest and
“schizophrenic” highest, although most mean ratings
were in the antiessentialist direction on the scale. These
ratings were, therefore, lower than would be expected
for racial, ethnic, and gender categories, indicating that
personality characteristics are typically essentialized to a
moderate extent.
Gelman’s (2003) study represents an important first
contribution to this topic, demonstrating that personal-
ity attributes are often somewhat essentialized, that dif-
ferent essentialist beliefs cohere, and that some attrib-
utes are essentialized more than others. As a first step, it
also has some limitations. First, the study does not estab-
lish the structure of essentialist beliefs about personality
and whether the relevant questionnaire items form a
coherent set. Second, the sample of personality char-
acteristics is small. Third, the study does not investigate
any factors that might contribute to the differential es-
sentializing of personality characteristics or any corre-
lates or implications of these differences. The studies
reported in this article were designed to examine these
questions. In two studies, we investigated whether per-
sonality characteristics are essentialized in a coherent
way and how the structure of essentialist beliefs about
personality should be described. Our studies also ex-
amine several possible correlates of essentialist beliefs.
STUDY 1
We have proposed that some scientific conceptions of
personality reflect an essentialist understanding of
human attributes, and that this understanding may also
be reflected in laypeople’s implicit personality theories.
Study 1 was conducted to determine whether essentialist
beliefs that had been found to covary in research on
social categories (Haslam et al., 2000, 2002) also co-
hered in beliefs about personality. Simply put, we asked
whether beliefs about the discreteness, biological basis,
immutability, informativeness, homogeneity, and inher-
ence of personality characteristics form a coherent set,
such that characteristics judged high on each property
also tend to be essentialized on the others. We also asked
how the structure of this expected covariation should be
described.
Previous research and theory offer two alternative
models of the structure of essentialist beliefs. Gelman’s
(2003) work implies a unifactorial structure, as she
formed a composite essentialism score by combining all
of her items. Alternatively, previous work by Haslam et al.
(2000, 2002) favors a model containing distinct and
orthogonal dimensions of naturalness and entitativity
consistent with Rothbart and Taylor’s (1992) description
of essentialism as having distinct aspects of inalterability
and inductive potential. However, this work exclusively
addresses social categories, and the two-dimensional
structure may not apply in the personality domain. If a
different structure applies in that domain, then essen-
tialist thinking might have different determinants and
implications from those documented in the study of
social categories. For example, essentialist beliefs about
personality might not have the same links to prejudice
and devaluation. A unifactorial structure would also cast
doubt on the applicability of concepts of natural kind
and entitativity in the personality domain. Given the
plausibility of both one- and two-dimensional models, we
made no specific structural predictions beyond an
expectation of overall covariation among the essentialist
beliefs.
Study 1 also tests three hypotheses about possible cor-
relates of personality essentialism. Little is known about
why some social distinctions are essentialized more than
others and some possibilities—for example, visible mor-
phology for race and gender (Rothbart & Taylor, 1992),
descent and endogamy for ethnicity (Gil-White, 2001),
abrupt transformation (Keil et al., 1999) for disease—do
not apply to personality characteristics. Our hypotheses
were, therefore, speculative. First, we hypothesized that
affective personality characteristics should tend to be
more essentialized than others because, according to
folk psychology, emotions are intimately linked to the
person’s biology (D’Andrade, 1987). As a result of this
embodiment, emotion-related personality characteris-
tics should be understood in a more naturalized manner
than others. This prediction about lay conceptions of
personality accords with scientific conceptions of tem-
perament, which is normally understood to be com-
posed of emotional traits that are substantially heritable
and biologically based (Clark & Watson, 1999).
Our second and third hypotheses derive from the
recent work of Leyens et al. (2000, 2001), who argued
that people selectively attribute a distinctively human
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essence or nature to themselves and their ingroup. By
implication, personality characteristics should be essen-
tialized if they are understood to be aspects of human
nature. Because human nature is a normative concept,
representing valued and in principle, widely shared
human attributes, personality characteristics that are
understood as aspects of it should be relatively desirable
and prevalent. Thus, positive (Hypothesis 2) and preva-
lent (Hypothesis 3) characteristics should be essential-
ized more than others because they are more likely to be
seen as elements of human nature.
Neither of these hypotheses is self-evident. Ethnic and
sexual minorities—groups both devalued and of low
prevalence—have been the focus of much past research
on essentialist beliefs. It has often been argued that
essentialist beliefs play an important role in prejudice
(e.g., Allport, 1954; Rothbart & Taylor, 1992), implying
that they are associated with the attribution of undesir-
able characteristics; and one study finds that more
essentialized social groups tend to have lower social sta-
tus (Haslam et al., 2000). Nevertheless, the logic of the
work of Leyens et al. (2000, 2001) is that aspects of nor-
mative human nature—of which personality characteris-
tics are more likely candidates than particular ethnic or
sexual identities—should tend to be essentialized.
Method
Participants. Seventy-three undergraduate psychology
students (58 women, 15 men), mean age 21.5 years (SD =
1.6), participated in the study as part of a laboratory
session.
Materials. All participants completed a questionnaire
in which they rated 80 personality descriptors. The
descriptors were systematically selected to yield a broad
and evaluatively diverse sample based on an inclusive
understanding of personality that extends beyond stan-
dard trait models (see Table 1). Forty terms were sam-
pled from adjectival markers of the Big Five trait dimen-
sions developed by John and Srivastava (1999), taking 4
descriptors from each pole of every dimension. Twenty
terms were sampled from Schwartz’s (1992) value taxon-
omy, taking 2 from each value segment. Ten terms were
derived from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Men-
tal Disorders (4th ed.; American Psychiatric Association,
1994) personality disorders, taking 1 emblematic term
for each disorder. Finally, 10 negative terms were sam-
pled from Benet-Martínez and Waller’s (2002) five-
dimensional model of highly evaluative terms.
Participants rated the personality descriptors on sub-
sets of nine items. Six of these items assessed essentialist
beliefs and were based on the Essentialist Beliefs Scale
developed by Haslam et al. (2000, 2002). That scale’s
original “uniformity” item was modified to refer to the
cross-situational consistency of behavior rather than the
similarity of category members because both refer to
forms of homogeneity. All items were rated on 7-point
Likert-type scales (1 = strongly disagree and 7 = strongly
agree) with the exception of biological basis, and the
items were written as follows:
Discreteness: “People either have this characteristic or they
do not: those who have it are a distinct type of person”
Biological basis: “To what extent is this characteristic based
on the person’s biological or genetic make-up? Write
one of the following percentages in the space provided”
(percentages from 0 to 100 in increments of 10)
Immutability: “It is easy to change this characteristic: it is not
a fixed attribute of the person” (reverse scored)
Informativeness: “This characteristic has broad ramifications:
it influences people’s behavior in a wide variety of situa-
tions and in many aspects of their lives”
Consistency: “People who have this characteristic will tend to
display it in a consistent manner, showing it in different
situations and with different people”
Inherence: “This characteristic is a deeply-rooted part of the
personality: it lies deep within the person and underlies
the person’s behavior”
Three additional items were written to assess vari-
ables hypothesized to be correlates of essentialist beliefs
about personality. These items assessed the social desir-
ability, population prevalence, and affectivity of person-
ality characteristics:
Desirability: “How desirable or positive is this personality
characteristic?” (1 = extremely undesirable and 7 = extremely
desirable)
Prevalence: “What percentage of the general population
could reasonably be described as having this characteris-
tic? (please write a number in the space provided)”
Affectivity: “Some personality characteristics are primarily
emotional (i.e., about emotions, moods and feelings)
and some are primarily cognitive (i.e., about beliefs and
ways of thinking). Rate the characteristics on the extent
to which they are primarily emotional or cognitive” (1 =
primarily emotional and7=primarily cognitive; reverse
scored)
Each participant completed a three-page question-
naire containing a cover sheet and two rating pages,
each listing the 80 personality descriptors and with one
item printed at the top.
Design and procedure. Each participant’s questionnaire
contained a randomly assigned pair of the nine items,
requiring a total of 160 ratings. The order of items in
each pair was also randomized. The 80 personality
descriptors were presented in a standard random order
or its exact reverse, and these two orders were also ran-
domly assigned within each questionnaire. Conse-
quently, each item was equally likely to be rated by each
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participant, in either first or second position, with either
of two descriptor orderings. Participants completed the
questionnaire in a classroom setting, in three groups of
18 to 29. Most finished within 20 minutes, after which
they were extensively debriefed.
Results
The focus of the study was on shared essentialist
beliefs about personality and on differences among the
80 personality descriptors rather than among partici-
pants, so ratings of the descriptors were aggregated
across the subsample of participants (mean n= 16.2)
who rated them on each item. Consequently, mean rat-
ings of each descriptor on each of the nine items served
as the basis for the data analyses. These aggregated rat-
ings are meaningful to the extent that participants agree
in their ratings. If agreement is adequate, a testable
requirement, then the aggregated ratings yield higher
levels of reliability than the individual ratings on which
they are based. Aggregation is particularly important
where ratings are apt to be somewhat difficult to make, as
in the sometimes complicated conceptual judgments
Haslam et al. / ESSENTIALISM AND PERSONALITY 1665
TABLE 1: Personality Descriptors Used in the Two Studies
Trait Value Personality Disorder Highly Evaluative
Talkative (E+; 1.00) Ambitious (Ach; 1.36) Suspicious (Paranoid; –0.76) Unremarkable (Ind; –3.04)
Assertive (E+; 1.14) Capable (Ach; –0.08) Detached (Schizoid; –0.92) Second-rate (Ind; –2.97)
Active (E+; 0.64) Helpful (Ben; 0.17) Eccentric (Schizotypal; 0.77) Contemptible (Dep; –0.93)
Energetic (E+; 0.79) Forgiving (Ben; –0.05) Aggressive (Antisocial; 0.84) Disagreeable (Dep; –0.77)
Reserved (E–; –0.04) Obedient (Con; –0.52) Impulsive (Borderline; 1.14) Incapable (Wor; –2.52)
Shy (E–; 0.09) Polite (Con; –0.65) Dramatic (Histrionic; 0.56) Subnormal (Wor; –1.78)
Withdrawn (E–; –0.12) Hedonistic (Hed; –0.09) Arrogant (Narcissistic; 1.04) Moronic (Stu; –1.27)
Quiet (E–; –0.08) Sensuous (Hed; –0.23) Hypersensitive (Avoidant; 0.81) Stupid (Stu; –1.17)
Sympathetic (A+; 0.37) Controlling (Pow; 0.93) Submissive (Dependant; –0.53) Odd (Unc; –1.18)
Kind (A+; 0.70) Dominant (Pow; 1.55) Inflexible (Obsessive-Comp; –0.39) Peculiar (Unc; –0.85)
Warm (A+; 0.97) Orderly (Sec; 0.04)
Generous (A+; 0.86) Conservative (Sec; 0.14)
Cold (A–; –0.35) Creative (Sel; 1.58)
Unfriendly (A–; –0.82) Independent (Sel; 1.36)
Hardhearted (A–; –1.13) Daring (Sti; 0.52)
Cruel (A–; –0.05) Thrill seeking (Sti; 0.82)
Organized (C+; 0.65) Humble (Tra; 0.35)
Thorough (C+; –0.26) Traditional (Tra; –0.13)
Reliable (C+; 0.88) Broad minded (Uni; 0.82)
Efficient (C+; 0.21) Wise (Uni; 0.61)
Careless (C–; –0.65)
Frivolous (C–; –0.56)
Irresponsible (C–; –0.84)
Undependable (C–; –0.87)
Tense (N+; –0.71)
Anxious (N+; 0.61)
Moody (N+; 0.14)
High strung (N+; 0.53)
Stable (N–; 0.50)
Calm (N–; 0.15)
Contented (N–; –0.99)
Peaceful (N–; –0.23)
Imaginative (O+; 1.39)
Intelligent (O+; 1.92)
Curious (O+; 0.37)
Artistic (O+; 1.18)
Shallow (O–; –1.06)
Simple minded (O–; –0.44)
Conventional (O–; 0.06)
Slow witted (O–; –0.57)
NOTE: Mean essentialism index score in parentheses. E = extraversion; A = agreeableness; C = conscientiousness; N = neuroticism; O = openness;
Ach = achievement; Ben = benevolence; Con = conformity; Hed = hedonism; Pow = power; Sec = security; Sel = self-direction; Sti = stimulation; Tra =
traditional; Uni = universalism; Ind = indistinction; Dep = depravity; Wor = worthlessness; Stu = stupidity; Unc = unconventionality.
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required by several of the items, and has been done
in previous work on essentialist beliefs (Haslam et al.,
2000).
Reliabilities of the aggregated ratings of the nine
items, as assessed by Cronbach’s alpha (i.e., treating
each rater as akin to a test item), are presented in Table
2. Reliabilities were generally moderate to very strong
(mean α= 0.77), with ratings of immutability alone
being weak (α= 0.40). Table 2 also presents mean aggre-
gated ratings of the 80 descriptors. Mean ratings on the
Likert-scaled items fall close to the scale midpoint of 4.
“Biological makeup” was attributed a substantial role in
the personality characteristics (mean 36.2%), which
were generally judged to apply to a large minority of the
population (mean 42.9%). One-way ANOVAs with post
hoc Scheffé comparisons (Bonferroni corrected) indi-
cated that the descriptor types differed on four of the six
essentialist belief items. In every case, the highly
evaluative terms were essentialized less than the trait,
value, and personality disorder descriptors. Predictably,
the highly evaluative and personality disorder
descriptors were judged to be more deviant—infrequent
and undesirable—than the value and trait descriptors.
Intercorrelations among the nine items across the 80
descriptors are presented in Table 3, which indicates
that the essentialist belief items are intercorrelated as
hypothesized. Ten of the 15 correlations are statistically
significant with a mean value of 0.34, which rises to 0.49
when correlations are disattenuated for unreliability. A
principal components analysis indicated that the six
essentialist belief items composed a single factor (48.9%
explained variance) based on the scree test (eigenvalues
2.94, 1.34, 0.75, 0.39, 0.37, 0.22). All items loaded sub-
stantially on the factor (> 0.42) with the exception of
immutability (0.21), a finding that might be explained
by the item’s unreliable assessment. The unifactorial
structure was strongly supported by an iterative factor
analysis (eigenvalues 2.68, 0.95, 0.25, 0.10, 0.03, 0.00).
This structure also held when analyses were restricted to
the 40 Big Five traits. Factor scores of the 80 descriptors
from the first principal component were therefore
employed as an essentialism index, which summarizes
the extent to which the descriptors were essentialized on
the six items. Scores of the descriptors on this index,
averaged across Studies 1 and 2, are presented in Table 1.
The essentialism index was used to test the study
hypotheses. Consistent with prediction, more desirable
personality characteristics were essentialized more, r=
0.54, p< .001, as were characteristics rated as more preva-
lent, r= 0.50, p< .001. Contrary to prediction, however,
more emotion-based characteristics were not more
essentialized, r= 0.10, ns, although Table 3 indicates that
1666 PERSONALITY AND SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY BULLETIN
TABLE 2: Item Reliabilities and Mean Item Ratings as a Function of Personality Descriptor Type, Study 1 (standard deviations in
parentheses)
Personality Descriptor Trait Value Personality Disorder Highly Evaluative Total
Discreteness .70 4.36a(.49) 4.47a(.47) 4.54a(.53) 3.48b(.44) 4.30 (.57)
Biological basis .81 37.7 (10.9) 32.4 (9.8) 39.9 (8.3) 34.0 (7.4) 36.2 (10.1)
Immutability* .40 3.85 (.49) 3.85 (.55) 3.45 (.38) 3.58 (.60) 3.76 (.52)
Informativeness .69 4.49a(.51) 4.64a(.42) 4.34a(.40) 3.60b(.63) 4.40 (.58)
Consistency .74 4.65a(.51) 4.83a(.40) 4.52a(.43) 3.77b(.47) 4.57 (.56)
Inherence .78 4.55a(.52) 4.72a(.48) 4.48a(.36) 3.24b(.58) 4.42 (.67)
Desirability .98 4.02a(1.95) 5.04a(1.26) 2.63b(0.81) 2.32b(.62) 3.89 (1.80)
Prevalence .88 46.3a(12.3) 48.4a(11.3) 34.1b(7.5) 27.3b(6.4) 42.9 (13.1)
Affectivity* .92 3.71 (1.27) 4.47 (1.17) 3.32 (0.89) 4.49 (0.42) 3.95 (1.19)
NOTE: *Reverse coded. Descriptor types with different superscripts differ significantly.
TABLE 3: Item Intercorrelations Across the Personality Descriptors, Study 1 (decimal omitted)
1 2 3 4 5 6789
1. Discreteness 100
2. Biological basis 33** 100
3. Immutability 37*** 31** 100
4. Informativeness 45*** 21 –09 100
5. Consistency 54*** 13 08 58*** 100
6. Inherence 62*** 27* –02 71*** 67*** 100
7. Desirability 29** 03 –25 38*** 70*** 57*** 100
8. Prevalence 18 –06 –33** 53*** 63*** 56*** 69*** 100
9. Affectivity 12 34** 00 04 –26* 27* –17 –15 100
*p< .05. **p< .01. ***p< .001.
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they were judged to be more biologically based and
inherent. Inspection of Table 3 also shows that desirabil-
ity, prevalence, and affectivity are intercorrelated, ren-
dering univariate tests potentially unreliable. Conse-
quently, a simultaneous multiple regression analysis was
conducted with the three variables serving as independ-
ent variables. As a set, these items powerfully predicted
the essentialism index, F(3,76) = 14.1, p< .0001, R= 0.60,
and each item had an independent effect (desirability:
β= 0.39, p= .003; prevalence: β= 0.26, p= .044; affectivity:
β= 0.21, p= .031). Thus a multivariate analysis supports
all three hypotheses.
Discussion
The findings of Study 1 offer substantial support for
its hypotheses. The essentialist belief items covaried
strongly and in a unifactorial manner, indicating that
people’s thinking about personality reflects a coherent
essentialist ontology that is systematically applied more
to some characteristics than others. Thus, a set of beliefs
that had been found to covary in studies of social catego-
ries also covaried for characteristics that are usually seen
as personal rather than social, as dimensions rather than
categories, and as adjectives rather than nouns. Simply
stated, personality characteristics understood to be bio-
logically based, discrete, immutable, informative, consis-
tent, or deeply rooted also tend to be understood in all of
the other ways as well.
In addition, the extent to which personality character-
istics were essentialized was predictable from their desir-
ability, prevalence, and emotional basis. The last effect
was relatively weak and did not emerge on a univariate
test, but it implies that affective characteristics are, as
D’Andrade (1987) proposed, more directly linked in
folk psychology to our underlying, embodied nature
than more cognitive characteristics.
The desirability and prevalence effects were more ro-
bust. Although essentialist beliefs are often invoked to
account for beliefs about deviant and devalued minori-
ties, in the personality domain, they appear to be held
primarily about valued and widely shared characteris-
tics. The work of Leyens et al. (2000, 2001) on “human
nature” offers a way to understand these effects. Almost
by definition, our fundamental nature as human beings
should be revealed in what we tend to have in common
and in what we value. By this account, desirable and prev-
alent characteristics are especially essentialized because
they constitute aspects of human nature. Leyens et al.
(2000) listed intelligence and language as candidates for
distinctively human essences, and it is interesting that the
2nd and 3rd most essentialized descriptors in Study 1 were
intelligent and talkative. Several other highly essential-
ized descriptors—independent (1st), creative (4th), imag-
inative (6th), ambitious (7th)—also arguably represent
distinctively human attributes of autonomy, originality,
transcendence of the senses, and future-oriented striving.1
STUDY 2
Study 1 demonstrates that people distinguish among
personality characteristics in a coherent essentialist fash-
ion and supports three hypotheses about factors that
may contribute to the greater essentializing of particular
characteristics. However, it remains to be seen whether
essentializing personality has a bearing on social cogni-
tion and behavior. If a coherent essentialist understand-
ing is held for some characteristics more than others, but
this understanding has no further implications, then
Study 1’s findings have limited relevance.
One plausible general hypothesis about the implica-
tions of essentialist beliefs is that more essentialized per-
sonality characteristics should be particularly important
bases for social inference and judgment. This hypothesis
can be justified on several grounds. First, highly essen-
tialized characteristics should be understood as informa-
tive and, hence, valuable for making wide-ranging infer-
ences about behavior. Second, they should be viewed as
homogeneous (consistent) in their manifestations and,
hence, likely to yield relatively accurate behavioral pre-
dictions across situations. Third, the perceived immuta-
bility of essentialized characteristics should make them
reliable sources of social inferences over time. Fourth,
their inherence and discreteness should make highly es-
sentialized characteristics seem to capture fundamental
and defining aspects of people. For all of these reasons,
more essentialized personality characteristics might be
understood as particularly fundamental—high in gener-
ality, significance, and reliability.
If essentialized personality characteristics are espe-
cially important for social cognition and behavior, this
importance could be manifest in several ways. First, es-
sentialized characteristics might be viewed as partic-
ularly central to personal identity, judged to be core
aspects of the person that define who he or she is. Allport
(1937) raised this issue of trait centrality to refer to the
fact that particular traits are especially prominent within
persons. In this spirit, Trafimow and Finlay (2001)
assessed trait importance by having people rate how im-
portant certain traits were for how they thought about
themselves. Essentialized personality characteristics
might be central in a more general way, seen as especially
salient and identity-determining for whoever possesses
them.
A second, more interpersonal manifestation of a char-
acteristic’s importance is its perceived utility for judging
other people. More “relationally important” characteris-
tics, in this sense, are those that people believe to be most
useful or valuable to know in evaluating potential inter-
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actants. Relational importance as defined here resembles
“trait centrality” as employed by Asch (1946) in his pio-
neering research on impression formation. More cen-
tral traits, in his sense, are those that exert a relatively
potent effect on impressions, and we might expect that
these are the traits that social perceivers would want to
know about in judging an unfamiliar person. If essen-
tialized personality characteristics are high in relational
importance, then people would be especially keen to
find evidence pertaining to them when making such
judgments.
A third form of importance involves communication.
The pragmatics of communication suggest that people
should normally endeavor to communicate the most rel-
evant and informative material to their interlocutors
(Grice, 1975). By implication, if they are describing a
person to someone else, people should select or empha-
size those personal attributes that are most vital to know.
If essentialized personality characteristics are particu-
larly important in this sense, then they should be more
communicable (Schaller, Conway, & Tanchuk, 2002).
Study 2 was designed to test the broad hypothesis that
more essentialized personality characteristics are judged
to be more important. Importance was assessed as cen-
trality, relational importance, and communicability, as
defined above. All three subsidiary hypotheses were also
expected to hold when other factors that might influ-
ence social importance were statistically controlled. For
instance, a personality characteristic’s importance for
some purposes might in part be a function of its desir-
ability or of its prevalence, as examined in Study 1. Com-
municators might tend to mention a person’s more posi-
tive attributes out of politeness, whereas undesirable
characteristics might be considered particularly impor-
tant in forming impressions (Hamilton & Zanna, 1972).
Characteristics that are central to identity might be those
that are particularly distinctive (i.e., low prevalence;
Blanton & Christie, 2003). Thus, we predicted that es-
sentialized characteristics would be judged to have high
importance independent of their social desirability and
prevalence. Finally, Study 2 aimed to replicate the struc-
ture of essentialist beliefs about personality, employing
the same items and characteristics as in Study 1.
Method
Participants. Eighty-one undergraduate psychology
students (64 women, 17 men), mean age 22.3 years (SD =
4.2), participated in the study as part of a laboratory
session.
Materials. Participants rated the 80 personality de-
scriptors from Study 1 on questionnaires that closely re-
sembled those completed in that study. The same six
essentialist belief items were employed, but participants
also rated three new items assessing the importance of
the personality characteristics. Importance was oper-
ationalized in three distinct ways: a characteristic’s cen-
trality to the identity of the person who possesses it, its
relational importance (i.e., the extent to which it would
be desirable for judging a prospective interactant), and
its communicability when describing someone who had
it to another person. These items were written as follows:
Centrality: “This characteristic is a central aspect of a per-
son’s personality: if you have it, it defines who you are”
(1 = strongly disagree and 7 = strongly agree)
Relational importance: “Imagine you are about to meet some-
one new who you will have to interact with for a substan-
tial period of time. How important would it be for you to
know that the person has this characteristic?” (1 = not at
all important and 5 = extremely important)
Communicability: “If you knew that a person had this charac-
teristic, how likely would you be to mention it when de-
scribing the person to someone else?” (1 = very unlikely
and 7 = very likely)
Design and procedure. The questionnaires were con-
structed according to the same design as in Study 1.
Again participants rated a randomly assigned and
ordered pair of the nine items, with two possible re-
versed orderings of the 80 personality descriptors. Par-
ticipants completed the questionnaires in a classroom
setting, in four groups of 15 to 27 participants, followed
by debriefing.
Results
As in Study 1, ratings were aggregated across the sub-
samples of participants who rated each item (mean n=
18.0). Reliabilities and mean ratings across the 80 per-
sonality descriptors are presented in Table 4. All
reliabilities were satisfactory (mean α= 0.79), indicating
that the aggregate ratings offer reliable estimates of
shared beliefs about the personality descriptors. The
reliability of immutability ratings was notably better than
in Study 1. As in Study 1, one-way ANOVAs with post hoc
Scheffé comparisons (Bonferroni corrected) indicated
that the highly evaluative personality descriptors scored
lower than the other descriptor types on four of the six
essentialist belief items. The same pattern held for the
centrality and communicability items.
Correlations among the mean ratings across the 80
personality descriptors are presented in Table 5, which
again reveals substantial intercorrelations among the six
essentialist belief items (mean r= 0.50). Immutability
correlated much more strongly with the other
essentialist belief items than in Study 1, probably
because of its improved reliability. A principal compo-
nents analysis indicated that a single factor accounted
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for the 6 items (59.1% explained variance), according to
both the Kaiser criterion and the scree test (eigenvalues
3.54, 0.95, 0.69, 0.46, 0.21, 0.16). Every item loaded pow-
erfully (> 0.59) on this factor. To pursue the structure of
essentialist beliefs about personality further, a confirma-
tory factor analysis compared the adequacy of a one-
factor model with models containing two correlated or
orthogonal factors corresponding to the natural kind
and entitativity factors obtained previously (Haslam
et al., 2000). The one-factor model (χ2/df = 5.52, root
mean square error of approximation [RMSEA] = .239)
fit substantially and significantly better than the model
containing two orthogonal factors (χ2/df = 10.93,
RMSEA = .355) and equally well as the model containing
two correlated factors (χ2/df = 5.44, RMSEA = .237). As
fit values for the two better fitting models did not differ
significantly, parsimony supports the one-factor model,
especially as the two factors were so highly correlated (r=
0.83) as to question their distinctness. Thus, scores on
the first principal component were again employed as an
essentialism index. This index correlated 0.91 with the
Study 1 index, demonstrating that the component is
highly replicable and yields a robust assessment of
essentialist beliefs. Similarly, all of the essentialist belief
items correlated very highly with the corresponding
items in Study 1 (rs ranged from 0.74 to 0.85), with the
exception of immutability (r= 0.39).
Study 2’s additional hypotheses predict that more
essentialized personality characteristics should be more
important, as operationalized by the centrality, rela-
tional importance, and communicability items. These
items correlated well across the sample of personality
descriptors (mean r= 0.47), consistent with them all rep-
resenting forms of importance. Univariate tests of the
hypothesized associations were uniformly supportive.
The essentialism index correlated 0.82 (p< .0001) with
centrality, 0.27 (p= .014) with relational importance,
and 0.69 (p< .0001) with communicability. Thus, more
essentialized personality characteristics were consis-
tently judged to be relatively important.
The univariate associations between the importance
items and the essentialism index might be complicated
by other variables not measured in Study 2. Indeed, the
desirability and prevalence ratings derived from Study 1
were strongly correlated with centrality (rs = .51 and .51,
ps < .001) and communicability (rs = .53 and .42, ps<
.001). To determine whether desirability and prevalence
might account for the correlations between the essen-
tialism index and the importance items, several simulta-
neous multiple regression analyses were conducted. In
Haslam et al. / ESSENTIALISM AND PERSONALITY 1669
TABLE 4: Item Reliabilities and Mean Item Ratings as a Function of Personality Descriptor Type, Study 2 (standard deviations in parentheses)
Personality Descriptor Trait Value Personality Disorder Highly Evaluative Total
Discreteness .73 4.38a(.44) 4.63a(.54) 4.79a(.62) 3.50b(.61) 4.38 (.62)
Biological basis .85 42.6 (9.9) 39.3 (9.5) 41.9 (8.5) 36.0 (10.9) 40.9 (9.8)
Immutability* .67 3.79 (.54) 3.69 (.45) 3.74 (.69) 4.27 (.59) 3.82 (.56)
Informativeness .77 4.87a(.42) 5.02a(.47) 5.07a(.43) 3.88b(.56) 4.81 (.57)
Consistency .80 4.59a(.64) 5.00a(.45) 4.40a(.47) 3.61b(.44) 4.55 (.68)
Inherence .81 4.43 a(.61) 4.76a(.52) 4.63a(.52) 3.22b(.77) 4.39 (.75)
Centrality .82 4.48a(.62) 4.64a(.48) 4.46a(.69) 3.30b(.76) 4.37 (.73)
Relational importance .79 2.93 (.49) 2.82 (.50) 2.80 (.46) 2.56 (.63) 2.84 (.51)
Communicability .88 4.41a(1.11) 4.55a(0.73) 4.18a(0.85) 2.99b(0.93) 4.24 (1.07)
*Reverse coded. Descriptor types with different superscripts differ significantly.
TABLE 5: Item Intercorrelations Across the Personality Descriptors, Study 2 (decimal omitted)
1 2 3 4 5 6789
1. Discreteness 100
2. Biological basis 38*** 100
3. Immutability 65*** 52*** 100
4. Informativeness 50*** 29** 19 100
5. Consistency 51*** 22 56*** 55*** 100
6. Inherence 69*** 47*** 61*** 64*** 72*** 100
7. Centrality 65*** 35** 48*** 71*** 70*** 82*** 100
8. Relational importance 18 02 05 56*** 27* 20 31** 100
9. Communicability 48*** 25* 48*** 56*** 71*** 64*** 76*** 34** 100
*p< .05. **p< .01. ***p< .001.
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these analyses, the importance items were dependent
variables and the essentialism index (from Study 2),
and desirability and prevalence (from Study 1) were the
independent variables. In each case, the association
between essentialist beliefs and importance remained
significant after desirability and prevalence were statis-
tically controlled. Standardized beta weights for the es-
sentialism index in the centrality, relational importance,
and communicability analyses were 0.74 (p< .0001), 0.31
(p= .018), and 0.56 (p< .0001), respectively. More impor-
tant personality characteristics, therefore, appear to be
more essentialized, independent of their evaluative
charge and judged prevalence. Desirability indepen-
dently predicted relational importance (β= –0.32, p=
.044) and communicability (β= 0.24, p= .044) in these
analyses, implying that people are more concerned to
know about undesirable characteristics of prospec-
tive interactants and more inclined to mention desir-
able characteristics when describing someone to a third
party.
Discussion
The findings of Study 2 clearly support the broad
hypothesis that essentialized personality characteristics
are judged to be particularly important and central
attributes of persons. Their relatively high importance
generalized across intrapersonal (centrality) and inter-
personal (relational importance and communicability)
domains and was not reducible to established determi-
nants of importance, such as desirability and distinctive-
ness (i.e., low prevalence). Essentialist beliefs, therefore,
may represent a previously unexamined determinant of
the importance of personality characteristics, which may
be relevant to researchers on identity, impression forma-
tion, and interpersonal communication. In short, part of
what makes some attributes particularly influential in
these domains may be the ontological assumptions that
people make about them. Just as people judge trait
adjectives to imply greater behavioral stability and con-
sistency than action verbs (Semin & Fiedler, 1988), they
also judge some adjectives to refer to more fundamental
and essence-like attributes than others.
Although it is plausible that the extent to which per-
sonality attributes are essentialized plays a causal role in
determining their importance and, hence, their role in
social cognition and identity, the causal arrow might
point in the opposite direction. More important person-
ality attributes, or attributes that are most often used in
social judgment and communication, might come to
be more essentialized. Kashima (2004), for example,
demonstrated how communication can increase the
perceived entitativity and essentialism of social groups.
Consequently, the findings of this study, such as the asso-
ciation between essentialism and communicability, can-
not be confidently interpreted as revealing a causal role
for essentialist beliefs in this domain.
GENERAL DISCUSSION
The present studies strongly suggest that a coherent
set of essentialist beliefs are held about personality char-
acteristics, just as previous research finds them to be held
about a variety of social categories. The studies, there-
fore, help to extend the range of domains in which psy-
chological essentialism applies. In doing so, they join a
small quantity of work that primarily examines chil-
dren’s understandings of traits (e.g., Giles, 2003; Yuill &
Pearson, 1998), focuses on single elements of essentialist
beliefs such as inherence (e.g., Semin & Krahé, 1987), or
addresses individual differences in essence-related
beliefs about personality as a whole rather than differ-
ences among personality characteristics (e.g., Levy et al.,
1998). Moreover, the studies demonstrate that essen-
tialist beliefs about personality are not only held, but are
also held preferentially for particular kinds of character-
istics and have several social-cognitive implications. Just
as academic trait theory presents a somewhat essentialist
view of traits, so do implicit personality theories apply
essentialist assumptions, as Gelman (1992) proposed.
Although the two studies provide good support for
the coherence of essentialist beliefs about personality,
the unifactorial structure of these beliefs differs from the
two-dimensional structure obtained in previous work on
social categories (Haslam et al., 2000, 2002). Different
belief structures may hold in the personality and social
category domains, such that the distinct entitativity and
natural kind dimensions obtained in the latter are some-
how fused in the former. Personality characteristics that
are “naturalized” (i.e., understood to be biologically
based, fixed, and discrete) also appear to be understood
as underlying entities (i.e., inherent, informative, and
consistent), whereas these two understandings are
largely independent for social categories. Reasons for
this apparent divergence are unclear, but it supports the
view that essentialist beliefs may be differently organized
in different domains.
One interpretation of the tendency for people to
essentialize some personality characteristics more than
others is that they treat some characteristics as more
“real” than others. If this is the case, and a realist view of
personality characteristics (Yuill, 1992) is applied selec-
tively, then it is little surprise that characteristics judged
to be more real are considered more important. Social
perceivers and actors are unlikely to base their identities,
judgments, or communications on characteristics that
they believe to be superficial, flimsy, and subjective.
However, we would argue that essentializing a person-
ality characteristic goes beyond adopting a realist view
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of it. Characteristics could be seen as real underlying
causes of behaviors without also being conceptualized as
biological, immutable, or discrete. The fact that these
beliefs cohere with those that more directly represent
the realist view (i.e., inherence, consistency) indicates
that essentializing a personality characteristic is not sim-
ply treating it as real. Instead, it amounts to treating the
characteristic as a real essence.
It does seem to be the case that some kinds of person-
ality characteristics are essentialized substantially less
than others. Notably, the highly evaluative personality
characteristics (Benet-Martínez & Waller, 2002) received
very low ratings on the essentialist belief items in both
studies. Although undesirable and relatively rare charac-
teristics were generally essentialized less than others, the
highly evaluative terms were still essentialized less than
the personality disorder descriptors, despite similar per-
ceived deviance. One interpretation of this finding is
that the highly evaluative personality terms were judged
to be more in the (jaundiced) eye of the beholder than
in the person beheld. Thus, these terms, most of which
are somewhat abusive, may be seen less as inhering,
enduring, consistent, and biologically based features of
persons and more as context-specific assessments made
by external observers. Although highly evaluative terms
may represent important but neglected forms of person-
ality description (Benet-Martínez & Waller, 2002), peo-
ple appear to perceive them to be quite different in
nature from other personality attributes.
Evaluative Implications of Essentialist Beliefs
Research and theory have tended to emphasize the
dark side of essentialist thinking about difference.
Allport (1954) drew attention to the link between beliefs
in a group essence and prejudice, and Rothbart and
Taylor (1992) argued that viewing social categories as
natural kinds accentuates group differences. Yzerbyt
et al. (1997) argued that essentialist beliefs rationalize
unjust social arrangements, Levy et al. (1998) demon-
strated that “entity theorists” are especially apt to en-
dorse stereotypes, and Haslam et al. (2000) found that
devalued social groups tend to be more essentialized
than others.
Our findings contribute to a growing awareness that
essentializing human differences is not invariably nega-
tive in its implications. Leyens et al. (2000, 2001) demon-
strated that a distinctively human essence is preferen-
tially attributed to favored ingroups, and Castano (2004)
showed that people prefer to belong to essentialized in-
groups. Haslam et al. (2002) found that some essentialist
beliefs were associated with more pro-gay attitudes, and
Verkuyten (2003) showed how essentialist discourse can
have progressive aspects for members of ethnic minori-
ties. The present study,therefore, adds to a body of work
that shows essentialist beliefs to have complicated impli-
cations for understanding difference.
One possible way to resolve these complexities is to
propose that essentialist beliefs have different dynamics
and determinants in different domains. It is clear that
many stigmatized social categories tend to be essential-
ized and likely that essentialist beliefs contribute to their
devaluation by rationalizing their low status and accentu-
ating their distinctiveness. It now seems equally clear
that personality characteristics that are valued and nor-
mative tend to be essentialized, and that essentialized
characteristics are perceived to be socially important.
These conclusions are consistent with Dunning’s (1995)
finding that people self-enhance most on traits that they
believe to be stable and important.
This rather stark difference in the implications of
essentialist beliefs may hinge on the kind of nature that is
being ascribed to social categories as distinct from per-
sonal attributes. Personality characteristics appear to be
essentialized to the extent that they partake of human
nature. All people can be seen as intelligent or imagina-
tive, at least to some degree. Most social categories, in
contrast, cannot easily be understood as aspects of an
encompassing human nature. They are, instead, ways in
which some humans are perceived to be categorically
different from others. Being female or White cannot be a
core aspect of what it is to be human in a world where
many people are neither, so whatever nature members of
each category share cannot be a broadly human nature.
Where social categories are concerned, then, essen-
tialist beliefs may tend to impute a nature that deepens
and legitimates a social division and, therefore, have
largely negative and exclusive implications. Where per-
sonality characteristics are concerned, however, essen-
tialist beliefs may tend to impute a human nature that is
positive and inclusive in its implications. Essentialized
personality characteristics are valued foundations for
social identity and judgment. Essentialized social cate-
gories, in contrast, are often devalued forms of social
distinction.
Some limitations of the present studies must also be
acknowledged. Although the hypothesized associations
between essentializing and social desirability, preva-
lence, centrality, social importance, and communicabil-
ity were all large, they are likely to overestimate the asso-
ciations implicitly perceived by individual participants.
Aggregated ratings capture the shared variance in partic-
ipants’ beliefs about personality characteristics—beliefs
that do indeed appear to be reasonably shared and
coherent—but do not allow the inference that all partici-
pants held the same beliefs with equal strength or a com-
parable structure. Individual differences in this domain
surely exist, and the work of Dweck and colleagues (e.g.,
Levy et al., 1998) demonstrates their importance. Our
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studies complement this work by focusing on shared
beliefs and on differences among personality character-
istics, and they also suggest that individual differences in
essentialist beliefs as a whole might well be investigated,
and not just beliefs about immutability.
Another limitation concerns our exclusive use of self-
ratings. Although this is probably unavoidable for assess-
ing essentialist beliefs and simple judgments about per-
sonality characteristics (i.e., their desirability, preva-
lence, and affectivity), the ratings of centrality, relational
importance, and communicability in Study 2 may not
adequately capture actual tendencies to employ the per-
sonality characteristics in identity construction, impres-
sion formation, and communication. Future research
should examine whether essentialized personality char-
acteristics are preferentially employed when these activi-
ties are assessed in more direct and behavioral ways. Ide-
ally, also, future research would develop experimental
methods for manipulating essentialist beliefs rather
than rely on correlational methods.
Despite these limitations, our studies make several
potentially important contributions. First, they establish
that implicit personality theories make essentialist
assumptions about at least some personality characteris-
tics, and that these assumptions have a similar structure
to those that are held about some social categories. Sec-
ond, they indicate that essentialist beliefs are most
strongly held about normative personality characteris-
tics, so that positive characteristics are anchored deeply
within human nature. By implication, negative charac-
teristics are seen as relatively superficial, inconsistent,
and unreal. Finally, our findings imply that essentialist
beliefs represent a new, but potentially powerful, deter-
minant of the importance that personality characteris-
tics have in social cognition and communication.
NOTE
1. Study 1 did not explicitly assess which personality characteristics
were considered aspects of human nature but assumed that such
aspects would be judged to be desirable and prevalent. To test this
assumption, we asked 15 undergraduate psychology students to rate
the 80 characteristics on the following item: “This characteristic is an
aspect of ‘human nature.’” Consistent with expectation, mean ratings
on this item correlated positively with mean Study 1 ratings of desirabil-
ity (r= 0.47, p< .001) and prevalence (r= 0.60, p< .001), and with the
Study 1 and 2 essentialism indices (rs = 0.75 and 0.76, ps < .001). Thus,
personality characteristics that are understood as aspects of human
nature do appear to be particularly essentialized.
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