Perceptions of racial essentialism and social identity threat

Abstract

While past research documents essentialist beliefs’ (i.e., believing social groups have inherent, unchangeable traits) impact on prejudice, no research has explored if stigmatized groups perceive essentialism as indicative of bias. With a sample of participants diverse in race and sexual orientation, we document that endorsers of racial essentialism were perceived as more likely to be racist and also as more likely to be sexist and heterosexist, relative to nonendorsers (Studies 1–2). As some essentialist beliefs about sexual orientation are associated with progay attitudes, another experiment parsed out dimensions of racial essentialism (i.e., natural kind and entitative beliefs) and examined differences in White sexual minorities’ expectations of bias from this race-based cue. Findings indicate that both essentialism dimensions elicited identity threat with potential consequences for sexual minorities’ desire to conceal their sexual orientation; thus, we broaden conceptualizations of cues that elicit identity threat while exploring nuances of the impact of perceiver identity and essentialism type.