This Open Access book examines how people often treat social group membership as inherent, immutable, informative and even intergenerationally inherited. Such essentialism remains one of the more puzzling folk intuitions, at odds with social science maintaining that people become culturally competent group members through enculturation, and that norms can change how group boundaries are defined quite substantially. Essentialism also features prominently in much rhetoric that justifies intergroup hostility and in researchers' attempts to explain it. Nonetheless, social scientists have not reached a consensus about essentialism's causal role in intergroup relations.

Psychologists, cultural anthropologists, and evolutionary biologists weigh in on these questions in this volume, often using specific cultural contexts as case studies to elucidate both the particularities and common patterns in the ways essentialism does, or does not, work in the real world.

Access the book via Springer Nature or the UC Davis Library.