1932

Abstract

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 to account for group differences. These conceptualizations have crucial consequences for intergroup attitudes, support for social policies, and structures of inequality, all of which are key sociological concerns; yet much of the research in this area has emerged outside of sociology. Our review of this interdisciplinary scholarship describes the range of views people hold, the attitudes and behaviors associated with them, and what factors contribute to these views. We focus primarily on essentialism and constructivism, although we describe the greater variety of beliefs beyond this dichotomy, as well as fluidity in how people use these concepts. We conclude by presenting research on strategies for reducing essentialist belief systems and identifying key areas for future research.

Loading

Article metrics loading...

/content/journals/10.1146/annurev-soc-031021-034017
2023-07-31
2024-10-16
Loading full text...

Full text loading...

/deliver/fulltext/soc/49/1/annurev-soc-031021-034017.html?itemId=/content/journals/10.1146/annurev-soc-031021-034017&mimeType=html&fmt=ahah

Literature Cited

  1. Aivelo T, Uitto A. 2021. Factors explaining students’ attitudes towards learning genetics and belief in genetic determinism. Int. J. Sci. Educ. 43:91408–25
    [Google Scholar]
  2. Am. Sociol. Assoc 2003. The Importance of Collecting Data and Doing Social Scientific Research on Race Washington, DC: Am. Sociol. Assoc.
    [Google Scholar]
  3. Atran S. 1998. Folk biology and the anthropology of science: cognitive universals and cultural particulars. Behav. Brain Sci. 21:547–609
    [Google Scholar]
  4. Barth F 1969. Introduction. Ethnic Groups and Boundaries: The Social Organization of Culture Difference F Barth 9–38. Boston: Little, Brown
    [Google Scholar]
  5. Bashi Treitler V. 2013. The Ethnic Project: Transforming Racial Fiction into Ethnic Factions Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press
    [Google Scholar]
  6. Bastian B, Haslam N. 2008. Immigration from the perspective of hosts and immigrants: roles of psychological essentialism and social identity. Asian J. Soc. Psychol. 11:2127–40
    [Google Scholar]
  7. Bernardo ABI, Salanga MGC, Tjipto S, Hutapea B, Yeung SS, Khan A. 2016. Contrasting lay theories of polyculturalism and multiculturalism: associations with essentialist beliefs of race in six Asian cultural groups. Cross-Cult. Res. 50:3231–50
    [Google Scholar]
  8. Bliss C. 2008. Mapping race through admixture. Int. J. Technol. Knowl. Soc. 4:479–84
    [Google Scholar]
  9. Bliss C. 2012. Race Decoded: The Genomic Fight for Social Justice Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press
    [Google Scholar]
  10. Bolnick DA 2008. Individual ancestry inference and the reification of race as a biological phenomenon. Revisiting Race in a Genomic Age BA Koenig, SS-J Lee, SS Richardson 70–88. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers Univ. Press
    [Google Scholar]
  11. Bolnick DA, Fullwiley D, Duster T, Cooper RS, Fujimura JH et al. 2007. The science and business of genetic ancestry testing. Science 318:5849399–400
    [Google Scholar]
  12. Braun L. 2006. Reifying human difference: the debate on genetics, race, and health. Int. J. Health Serv. 36:3557–73
    [Google Scholar]
  13. Braun L, Saunders B. 2017. Avoiding racial essentialism in medical science curricula. AMA J. Ethics 19:6518–27
    [Google Scholar]
  14. Brubaker R. 2009. Ethnicity, race, and nationalism. Annu. Rev. Sociol. 35:21–42
    [Google Scholar]
  15. Brubaker R, Loveman M, Stamatov P. 2004. Ethnicity as cognition. Theory Soc. 33:131–64
    [Google Scholar]
  16. Byers-Heinlein K, Garcia B 2015. Bilingualism changes children's beliefs about what is innate. Dev. Sci. 18:2344–50
    [Google Scholar]
  17. Byrd WC, Hughey MW. 2015. Biological determinism and racial essentialism: the ideological double helix of racial inequality. Ann. Am. Acad. Political Soc. Sci. 661:18–22
    [Google Scholar]
  18. Byrd WC, Ray VE. 2015. Ultimate attribution in the genetic era: White support for genetic explanations of racial difference and policies. Ann. Am. Acad. Political Soc. Sci. 661:1212–35
    [Google Scholar]
  19. Chen JM, Ratliff KA. 2018. Psychological essentialism predicts intergroup bias. Soc. Cogn. 36:3301–23
    [Google Scholar]
  20. Condit CM. 2011. When do people deploy genetic determinism? A review pointing to the need for multi-factorial theories of public utilization of scientific discourses. Sociol. Compass. 5:7618–35
    [Google Scholar]
  21. Condit CM. 2019. Laypeople are strategic essentialists, not genetic essentialists. Hastings Cent. Rep. 49:S27–37
    [Google Scholar]
  22. Condit CM, Parrott R, Bates B, Bevan J, Achter P. 2004a. Exploration of the impact of messages about genes and race on lay attitudes. Clin. Genet. 66:5402–8
    [Google Scholar]
  23. Condit CM, Parrott RL, Harris TM, Lynch J, Dubriwny T. 2004b. The role of “genetics” in popular understandings of race in the United States. Public Underst. Sci. 13:3249–72
    [Google Scholar]
  24. Conley D, Fletcher J. 2017. The Genome Factor: What the Social Genomics Revolution Reveals About Ourselves, Our History, and the Future Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press
    [Google Scholar]
  25. Cornell S, Hartmann D. 1998. Ethnicity and Race: Making Identities in a Changing World Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press
    [Google Scholar]
  26. Dar-Nimrod I, Heine SJ 2011. Genetic essentialism: on the deceptive determinism of DNA. Psychol. Bull. 137:5800–818
    [Google Scholar]
  27. Davis FJ. 1991. Who Is Black? One Nation's Definition University Park, PA: Pa. State Univ. Press
    [Google Scholar]
  28. Deeb I, Segall G, Birnbaum D, Ben-Eliyahu A, Diesendruck G. 2011. Seeing isn't believing: the effect of intergroup exposure on children's essentialist beliefs about ethnic categories. J. Pers. Soc. Psychol. 101:61139–56
    [Google Scholar]
  29. Deyrup A, Graves JL. 2022. Racial biology and medical misconceptions. N. Engl. J. Med. 386:6501–3
    [Google Scholar]
  30. Diesendruck G, Birnbaum D, Deeb I, Segall G. 2013a. Learning what is essential: relative and absolute changes in children's beliefs about the heritability of ethnicity. J. Cogn. Dev. 14:4546–60
    [Google Scholar]
  31. Diesendruck G, Goldfein-Elbaz R, Rhodes M, Gelman S, Neumark N. 2013b. Cross-cultural differences in children's beliefs about the objectivity of social categories. Child Dev. 84:61906–17
    [Google Scholar]
  32. Diesendruck G, Menahem R. 2015. Essentialism promotes children's inter-ethnic bias. Front. Psychol. 6:1180
    [Google Scholar]
  33. Domínguez VR. 1986. White By Definition: Social Classification in Creole Louisiana New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers Univ. Press
    [Google Scholar]
  34. Donovan BM. 2014. Playing with fire? The impact of the hidden curriculum in school genetics on essentialist conceptions of race. J. Res. Sci. Teach. 51:4462–96
    [Google Scholar]
  35. Donovan BM. 2015. Reclaiming race as a topic of the U.S. biology textbook curriculum. Sci. Educ. 99:61092–1117
    [Google Scholar]
  36. Donovan BM. 2016. Framing the genetics curriculum for social justice: an experimental exploration of how the biology curriculum influences beliefs about racial difference. Sci. Educ. 100:3586–616
    [Google Scholar]
  37. Donovan BM. 2017. Learned inequality: racial labels in the biology curriculum can affect the development of racial prejudice. J. Res. Sci. Teach. 54:3379–411
    [Google Scholar]
  38. Donovan BM. 2022. Ending genetic essentialism through genetics education. Hum. Genet. Genom. Adv. 3:1100058
    [Google Scholar]
  39. Donovan BM, Semmens R, Keck P, Brimhall E, Busch KC et al. 2019. Toward a more humane genetics education: Learning about the social and quantitative complexities of human genetic variation research could reduce racial bias in adolescent and adult populations. Sci. Educ. 103:3529–60
    [Google Scholar]
  40. Donovan BM, Weindling M, Salazar B, Duncan A, Stuhlsatz M, Keck P. 2020. Genomics literacy matters: Supporting the development of genomics literacy through genetics education could reduce the prevalence of genetic essentialism. J. Res. Sci. Teach. 58:4520–50
    [Google Scholar]
  41. Dougherty MJ, Pleasants C, Solow L, Wong A, Zhang H. 2011. A comprehensive analysis of high school genetics standards: Are states keeping pace with modern genetics?. CBE Life Sci. Educ. 10:3318–27
    [Google Scholar]
  42. Dubriwny TN, Bates BR, Bevan JL. 2004. Lay understandings of race: cultural and genetic definitions. Commun. Genet. 7:4185–95
    [Google Scholar]
  43. Duster T. 2003. Backdoor to Eugenics New York: Routledge. , 2nd ed..
    [Google Scholar]
  44. Duster T. 2015. A post-genomic surprise. The molecular reinscription of race in science, law and medicine. Br. J. Sociol. 66:11–27
    [Google Scholar]
  45. Eberhardt JL, Randall JL. 1997. The essential notion of race. Psychol. Sci. 8:3198–203
    [Google Scholar]
  46. Fausto-Sterling A. 2008. The bare bones of race. Soc. Stud. Sci. 38:5657–94
    [Google Scholar]
  47. Fujimura JH, Bolnick DA, Rajagopalan R, Kaufman JS, Lewontin RC et al. 2014. Clines without classes: how to make sense of human variation. Sociol. Theory 32:3208–27
    [Google Scholar]
  48. Fullwiley D. 2008. The biologistical construction of race “admixture” technology and the new genetic medicine. Soc. Stud. Sci. 38:5695–735
    [Google Scholar]
  49. Gelman SA. 2003. The Essential Child Origins of Essentialism in Everyday Thought Oxford, UK: Oxford Univ. Press
    [Google Scholar]
  50. Gelman SA, Hirschfeld LA 1999. How biological is essentialism?. Folkbiology DL Medin, S Atran 403–46. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press
    [Google Scholar]
  51. Gericke N, Carver R, Castera J, Menezes Evangelista NA, Marre CC, El-Hani CN 2017. Exploring relationships among belief in genetic determinism, genetics knowledge, and social factors. Sci. Educ. 26:101223–59
    [Google Scholar]
  52. Gingell G, Bergemann A. 2022. Disrupting essentialism in medical genetics education. Med. Sci. Educ. 32:1255–62
    [Google Scholar]
  53. Glasgow J, Shulman JL, Covarrubias EG. 2009. The ordinary conception of race in the United States and its relation to racial attitudes: a new approach. J. Cogn. Cult. 9:115–38
    [Google Scholar]
  54. Graves JL. 2004. The Race Myth: Why We Pretend Race Exists in America New York: Plume
    [Google Scholar]
  55. Hall E, Jones N, Hughes B. 2022. The elephant in the room: teaching race in consensus. Soc. Work Educ. https://doi.org/10.1080/02615479.2022.2078298
    [Google Scholar]
  56. Haney López IF. 1996. White by Law: The Legal Construction of Race New York: NYU Press
    [Google Scholar]
  57. Haslam N, Rothschild L, Ernst D. 2000. Essentialist beliefs about social categories. Br. J. Soc. Psychol. 39:113–27
    [Google Scholar]
  58. Haslam N, Rothschild L, Ernst D. 2002. Are essentialist beliefs associated with prejudice?. Br. J. Soc. Psychol. 41:187–100
    [Google Scholar]
  59. Hirschfeld LA. 1996. Race in the Making: Cognition, Culture, and the Child's Construction of Human Kinds Cambridge, MA: MIT Press
    [Google Scholar]
  60. Hirschfeld LA, Gelman SA. 1997. What young children think about the relationship between language variation and social difference. Cogn. Dev. 12:2213–38
    [Google Scholar]
  61. Ho AK, Roberts SO, Gelman SA. 2015. Essentialism and racial bias jointly contribute to the categorization of multiracial individuals. Psychol. Sci. 26:101639–45
    [Google Scholar]
  62. Hoffman KM, Trawalter S, Axt JR, Oliver MN. 2016. Racial bias in pain assessment and treatment recommendations, and false beliefs about biological differences between Blacks and Whites. PNAS 113:164296–4301
    [Google Scholar]
  63. Hu OY, Lu X, Roth WD. 2022. Linking race and genes: Racial conceptualization among genetic ancestry test-takers. SocArXiv. https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/4qskn/
  64. Hubbard AR. 2017. Testing common misconceptions about the nature of human racial variation. Am. Biol. Teach. 79:7538–43
    [Google Scholar]
  65. Hunt MO. 2007. African American, Hispanic, and White beliefs about Black/White inequality, 1977–2004. Am. Sociol. Rev. 72:3390–415
    [Google Scholar]
  66. Jamieson A, Radick G. 2017. Genetic determinism in the genetics curriculum: an exploratory study of the effects of Mendelian and Weldonian emphases. Sci. Educ. 26:101261–90
    [Google Scholar]
  67. Jayaratne TE, Gelman SA, Feldbaum M, Sheldon JP, Petty EM, Kardia SLR. 2009. The perennial debate: nature, nurture, or choice? Black and White Americans’ explanations for individual differences. Rev. Gen. Psychol. 13:124–33
    [Google Scholar]
  68. Jayaratne TE, Ybarra O, Sheldon JP, Brown TN, Feldbaum M et al. 2006. White Americans’ genetic lay theories of race differences and sexual orientation: their relationship with prejudice toward Blacks, and gay men and lesbians. Group Process. Intergroup Relat. 9:177–94
    [Google Scholar]
  69. Kahn J. 2008. Exploiting race in drug development: BiDil's interim model of pharmacogenomics. Soc. Stud. Sci. 38:5737–58
    [Google Scholar]
  70. Keller J. 2005. In genes we trust: the biological component of psychological essentialism and its relationship to mechanisms of motivated social cognition. J. Pers. Soc. Psychol. 88:4686–702
    [Google Scholar]
  71. Kimel S, Huesmann R, Kunst J, Halperin E. 2016. Living in a genetic world: how learning about interethnic genetic similarities and differences affects peace and conflict. Pers. Soc. Psychol. Bull. 42:5688–700
    [Google Scholar]
  72. Kinzler KD, Dautel JB. 2012. Children's essentialist reasoning about language and race. Dev. Sci. 15:1131–38
    [Google Scholar]
  73. Knowles E, Tropp L, Mogami M. 2022. When White Americans see “non-Whites” as a group: belief in minority collusion and support for White identity politics. Group Process. Intergroup Relat. 25:3768–90
    [Google Scholar]
  74. Lamont M, Molnár V. 2002. The study of boundaries in the social sciences. Annu. Rev. Sociol. 28:167–95
    [Google Scholar]
  75. Lee J. 2000. The salience of race in everyday life: Black customers’ shopping experiences in Black and White neighborhoods. Work Occup. 27:3353–76
    [Google Scholar]
  76. Lee J-K, Shin S, Yoo HH. 2018. Exploring the ontological status of the race concept as perceived by Korean medical students. EURASIA J. Math. Sci. Technol. Educ. 14:10em1582
    [Google Scholar]
  77. Lee SS-J. 2015. The biobank as political artifact: the struggle over race in categorizing genetic difference. Ann. Am. Acad. Political Soc. Sci. 661:1143–59
    [Google Scholar]
  78. Leffers JS, Coley JD. 2021. Do I know you? The role of culture in racial essentialism and facial recognition memory. J. Appl. Res. Mem. Cogn. 10:15–12
    [Google Scholar]
  79. Leshin RA, Leslie S, Rhodes M. 2021. Does it matter how we speak about social kinds? A large, preregistered, online experimental study of how language shapes the development of essentialist beliefs. Child Dev. 92:4e531–47
    [Google Scholar]
  80. Lewis ACF, Molina SJ, Appelbaum PS, Dauda B, Di Rienzo A et al. 2022. Getting genetic ancestry right for science and society. Science 376:6590250–52
    [Google Scholar]
  81. Lewontin RC, Rose S, Kamin LJ. 1984. Not In Our Genes: Biology, Ideology, and Human Nature New York: Pantheon
    [Google Scholar]
  82. Li A, Deyrup AT, Graves JL, Ross LF. 2022. Race in the reading: a study of problematic uses of race and ethnicity in a prominent pediatrics textbook. Acad. Med. 97:1521–27
    [Google Scholar]
  83. Loveman M. 1999. Is “race” essential?. Am. Sociol. Rev. 64:6891–98
    [Google Scholar]
  84. Loveman M. 2014. National Colors: Racial Classification and the State in Latin America Oxford, UK: Oxford Univ. Press
    [Google Scholar]
  85. Mandalaywala TM. 2020. Does essentialism lead to racial prejudice? It is not so Black and White. Adv. Child Dev. Behav. 59:195–245
    [Google Scholar]
  86. Mandalaywala TM, Amodio DM, Rhodes M. 2018. Essentialism promotes racial prejudice by increasing endorsement of social hierarchies. Soc. Psychol. Personal. Sci. 9:4461–69
    [Google Scholar]
  87. Medin DL. 1989. Concepts and conceptual structure. Am. Psychol. 44:121469–81
    [Google Scholar]
  88. Medin DL, Ortony A 1989. Comments on Part I: psychological essentialism. Similarity and Analogical Reasoning S Vosniadou, A Ortony 179–95. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press
    [Google Scholar]
  89. Moftizadeh N, Zagefka H, Mohamed A 2021. Essentialism affects the perceived compatibility of minority culture maintenance and majority culture adoption preferences. Br. J. Soc. Psychol. 60:2635–52
    [Google Scholar]
  90. Morin-Chassé A. 2020. Behavioral genetics, population genetics, and genetic essentialism: a survey experiment. Sci. Educ. 29:61595–1619
    [Google Scholar]
  91. Morin-Chassé A, Suhay E, Jayaratne TE. 2017. Discord over DNA: ideological responses to scientific communication about genes and race. J. Race Ethn. Politics 2:2260–99
    [Google Scholar]
  92. Morning A. 2009. Toward a sociology of racial conceptualization for the 21st century. Soc. Forces. 87:31167–92
    [Google Scholar]
  93. Morning A. 2011. The Nature of Race: How Scientists Think and Teach About Human Difference Berkeley, CA: Univ. Calif. Press
    [Google Scholar]
  94. Morning A, Maneri M. 2022. An Ugly Word: Rethinking Race in Italy and the United States New York: Russell Sage Found.
    [Google Scholar]
  95. Morton TA, Hornsey MJ, Postmes T. 2009. Shifting ground: the variable use of essentialism in contexts of inclusion and exclusion. Br. J. Soc. Psychol. 48:135–59
    [Google Scholar]
  96. Murphy GL, Medin DL. 1985. The role of theories in conceptual coherence. Psychol. Rev. 92:3289–316
    [Google Scholar]
  97. No S, Hong Y, Liao H-Y, Lee K, Wood D, Chao MM. 2008. Lay theory of race affects and moderates Asian Americans’ responses toward American culture. J. Pers. Soc. Psychol. 95:4991–1004
    [Google Scholar]
  98. Omi M, Winant H. 1994. Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s New York: Routledge. , 2nd ed..
    [Google Scholar]
  99. Ossorio P, Duster T. 2005. Race and genetics: controversies in biomedical, behavioral, and forensic sciences. Am. Psychol. 60:1115–28
    [Google Scholar]
  100. Parrott RL, Silk KJ, Condit C. 2003. Diversity in lay perceptions of the sources of human traits: genes, environments, and personal behaviors. Soc. Sci. Med. 56:51099–1109
    [Google Scholar]
  101. Pauker K, Ambady N, Apfelbaum EP. 2010. Race salience and essentialist thinking in racial stereotype development. Child Dev. 81:61799–1813
    [Google Scholar]
  102. Pauker K, Xu Y, Williams A, Biddle AM 2016. Race essentialism and social contextual differences in children's racial stereotyping. Child Dev. 87:51409–22
    [Google Scholar]
  103. Phelan JC, Link BG, Feldman NM. 2013. The genomic revolution and beliefs about essential racial differences: a backdoor to eugenics?. Am. Sociol. Rev. 78:2167–91
    [Google Scholar]
  104. Phelan JC, Link BG, Zelner S, Yang LH. 2014. Direct-to-consumer racial admixture tests and beliefs about essential racial differences. Soc. Psychol. Q. 77:3296–318
    [Google Scholar]
  105. Phillips EM, Odunlami AO, Bonham VL. 2007. Mixed race: understanding difference in the genome era. Soc. Forces. 86:795–820
    [Google Scholar]
  106. Ray V. 2019. A theory of racialized organizations. Am. Sociol. Rev. 84:126–53
    [Google Scholar]
  107. Rhodes M, Leslie S-J, Tworek CM. 2012. Cultural transmission of social essentialism. PNAS 109:3413526–31
    [Google Scholar]
  108. Rhodes M, Mandalaywala TM. 2017. The development and developmental consequences of social essentialism. WIREs Cogn. Sci. 8:4e1437
    [Google Scholar]
  109. Rizzo M, Green E, Dunham Y, Bruneau E, Rhodes M. 2022. Beliefs about social norms and racial inequalities predict variation in the early development of racial bias. Dev. Sci. 25:2e13170
    [Google Scholar]
  110. Roberts D. 2011. Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century New York: New Press
    [Google Scholar]
  111. Roediger DR. 2005. Working Toward Whiteness: How America's Immigrants Became White: The Strange Journey from Ellis Island to the Suburbs New York: Basic Books
    [Google Scholar]
  112. Roth WD, Yaylacı Ş, Adkins J. 2019. Determinants of Genetic Essentialist Beliefs about Race: A Comparison of Canada and the United States Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Canadian Political Science Association Vancouver, BC: June 4
    [Google Scholar]
  113. Roth WD, Yaylacı Ş, Jaffe K, Richardson L. 2020. Do genetic ancestry tests increase racial essentialism? Findings from a randomized controlled trial. PLOS ONE 15:1e0227399
    [Google Scholar]
  114. Rothbart M, Taylor M 1992. Category labels and social reality: Do we view social categories as natural kinds?. Language, Interaction and Social Cognition GR Semin, K Fiedler 11–36. London: Sage
    [Google Scholar]
  115. Sanchez DT, Garcia JA. 2009. When race matters: racially stigmatized others and perceiving race as a biological construction affect biracial people's daily well-being. Pers. Soc. Psychol. Bull. 35:91154–64
    [Google Scholar]
  116. Saperstein A, Penner AM, Light R. 2013. Racial formation in perspective: connecting individuals, institutions and power relations. Annu. Rev. Sociol. 39:359–78
    [Google Scholar]
  117. Seekings J. 2008. The continuing salience of race: discrimination and diversity in South Africa. J. Contemp. Afr. Stud. 26:11–25
    [Google Scholar]
  118. Shostak S, Freese J, Link BG, Phelan JC. 2009. The politics of the gene: social status and beliefs about genetics for individual outcomes. Soc. Psychol. Q. 72:177–93
    [Google Scholar]
  119. Smedley A. 2007. Race in North America: Origin and Evolution of a Worldview Boulder, CO: Westview. , 3rd ed..
    [Google Scholar]
  120. Smedley A, Smedley BD. 2005. Race as biology is fiction, racism as a social problem is real: anthropological and historical perspectives on the social construction of race. Am. Psychol. 60:116–26
    [Google Scholar]
  121. Suhay E, Jayaratne TE. 2013. Does biology justify ideology? The politics of genetic attribution. Public Opin. Q. 77:2497–521
    [Google Scholar]
  122. Tadmor CT, Chao MM, Hong Y, Polzer JT. 2013. Not just for stereotyping anymore: racial essentialism reduces domain-general creativity. Psychol. Sci. 24:199–105
    [Google Scholar]
  123. Tawa J. 2016. Belief in race as biological: early life influences, intergroup outcomes, and the process of “unlearning. .” Race Soc. Probl. 8:3244–55
    [Google Scholar]
  124. Tawa J. 2017. The Beliefs About Race Scale (BARS): dimensions of racial essentialism and their psychometric properties. Cultur. Divers. Ethnic Minor. Psychol. 23:4516–26
    [Google Scholar]
  125. Tawa J. 2018. Dimensions of racial essentialism and racial nominalism: a mixed-methods study of beliefs about race. Race Soc. Probl. 10:2145–57
    [Google Scholar]
  126. Tawa J. 2022. Racial essentialism and stress: a deadly combination for prospective police officers’ encounters with Black suspects. Race Soc. Probl. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12552-022-09356-5
    [Google Scholar]
  127. Taylor MG, Rhodes M, Gelman SA. 2009. Boys will be boys; cows will be cows: children's essentialist reasoning about gender categories and animal species. Child Dev. 80:2461–81
    [Google Scholar]
  128. Tishkoff SA, Kidd KK. 2004. Implications of biogeography of human populations for “race” and medicine. Nat. Genet. 36:S21–27
    [Google Scholar]
  129. Tsai J, Lindo E, Bridges K. 2021. Seeing the window, finding the spider: applying critical race theory to medical education to make up where biomedical models and social determinants of health curricula fall short. Front. Public Health 9:653643
    [Google Scholar]
  130. Verkuyten M, Brug P. 2004. Multiculturalism and group status: the role of ethnic identification, group essentialism and protestant ethic. Eur. J. Soc. Psychol. 34:6647–61
    [Google Scholar]
  131. Williams MJ, Eberhardt JL. 2008. Biological conceptions of race and the motivation to cross racial boundaries. J. Pers. Soc. Psychol. 94:61033–47
    [Google Scholar]
  132. Willinsky J. 2020. The confounding of race in high school biology textbooks, 2014–2019. Sci. Educ. 29:61459–76
    [Google Scholar]
  133. Wilton LS, Apfelbaum EP, Good JJ. 2018. Valuing differences and reinforcing them: multiculturalism increases race essentialism. Soc. Psychol. Personal. Sci. 10:5681–89
    [Google Scholar]
  134. Wimmer A. 2008. The making and unmaking of ethnic boundaries: a multilevel process theory. Am. J. Sociol. 113:4970–1022
    [Google Scholar]
  135. Yalcinkaya NS, Estrada-Villalta S, Adams G 2017. The (biological or cultural) essence of essentialism: implications for policy support among dominant and subordinated groups. Front. Psychol. 8:900
    [Google Scholar]
  136. Yaylacı Ş, Roth WD, Jaffe K. 2021. Measuring racial essentialism in the genomic era: the genetic essentialism scale for race (GESR). Curr. Psychol. 40:83794–3808
    [Google Scholar]
  137. Yzerbyt V, Rocher S, Schadron G 1997. Stereotypes as explanations: a subjective essentialistic view of group perception. The Social Psychology of Stereotyping and Group Life, ed. R Spears, PJ Oakes, N Ellemers, SA Haslam 20–50. Oxford, UK: Blackwell
    [Google Scholar]
/content/journals/10.1146/annurev-soc-031021-034017
Loading
  • Article Type: Review Article
This is a required field
Please enter a valid email address
Approval was a Success
Invalid data
An Error Occurred
Approval was partially successful, following selected items could not be processed due to error