Summary Of Essentialism And Racial Bias

The Ho, Roberts and Gelman article, Essentialism and Racial Bias Jointly Contribute to the Categorizations of Multiracial Individuals examined the joint effects of cognitive biases and social biases on hypodescent. Loosely, hypodescent can be defined as individuals’ penchant to categorize mixed race individuals into solely the race of the minority category (Ho et al,, 2015). While previous studies have examined the effects of cognitive biases and social motivation on hypodescence respectively, the authors were motivated by the dearth of available studies that examined effects of cognitive biases and social motivations jointly. Since, both cognitive biases and social motivations require higher levels of cognitive processing, it can be inferred …show more content…
Similarity then defines whether something belongs in a particular category. Typicality, which explains that some things are better exemplars for a category than others, serves as evidence for the modern view of categorization as it accounts for idiosyncratic amongst members of a group (Psych 240 Lecture 11/26/15). In the article, participant’s tendency to employ essentialism to categorize individuals along racial lines may demonstrate the participants’ attempts to make sense of information without a lot of information. Participants in the experiment, without any substantive information may be using categorizing as a heuristic. A heuristic is a mental shortcut that individuals use to make sense of the world and while heuristics frequently enable one to operate efficiently, heuristics can also occasionally lead one to err (Kahneman & Tversky, 1982). It is important to note that essentialism and the use of heuristics to categorize individuals should not be considered malice. Just as the article’s findings suggest, that essentialism alone is not sufficient for hypodescence, essentialism does not reveal one’s attitude towards particular …show more content…
The absence of a main effect means that neither of the independent variables, alone, had an effect on the dependent variable, which in the context of the experiment, was hypodescence (Psych Section 9/19/15). However, the study did find an interaction between the two independent variables. An interaction is when the effect of an independent variable on the dependent variable is contingent upon another independent variable (Psych Section, 9/19/15). For this experiment, an interaction occurred between the two independent variables, essentialism and social motivation. Study one revealed that, at low levels of essentialism there was no correlation between hypodescence and anti-Black bias, but at high levels of essentialism there was a positive relationship between anti-Black bias and hypodescence. Study one revealed that, alone essentialism revealed little about hypodescence, but when augmented with information regarding anti-Black bias, a correlation between the two could be

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