Susan Gelman on Essentialism

Do you want to start by explaining what essentialism is?

People have all kinds of cognitive biases, ways that we look at the world that are not quite in tune with reality, shortcuts that we use to make sense of the world. Essentialism is one of those and seems to be really pervasive. It’s how we think about everyday categories around us, like women or dogs or gold, or social categories, like different races or ethnicities. We tend to think that if we have a word for these categories, that it’s real and based in nature, that it’s not constructed by humans, but is really out there. We think that it has some deep, underlying basis and that if we look hard enough, we’ll be able to learn something about that deep underlying something that all members of the category have in common. That’s why it’s called essentialism, because that underlying something, that makes a Jew a member of that category, for example, is the essence.

People have looked at this in different cultures. In modern educated American culture people often think, “Oh, genes or DNA, that’s the essence that all members of a category share.” But if you go to cultures where they don’t have that scientific understanding, they still think there is something there that all members of the category share.

Are you saying that there isn’t anything there? That it’s just a cognitive bias?

If you ask biologists, they would say, “No, there is not any one thing that’s inherent in each individual member of a category.” Let’s jump right into race, which is one of the most contested areas. An essentialist would say that there is a sharp divide between white and black. That all members of the category of white people have something in common in their DNA, where you could identify absolutely – yes or no – if they’re a member of that category, what’s different from people who are black, and that that has all kinds of deep consequences for behaviour, personality, et cetera.

A biologist would say, no. For one thing, it’s all about variation. There is no one thing that all white people have in common. There’s all this variability in DNA at the individual level, and the differences between people of so-called different races are predictive of appearance, of skin colour, and whatever other superficial differences we use to distinguish races. They actually are not predictive of anything else. You get nearly as much variability in genetic material in one community in Africa, as you get across the world. There is no evidence that genes that predict outward physical differences are deeply determining of any other traits. So that is one thing. Another thing is that even if you actually take a species, like different kinds of birds, for example – from a biologist’s perspective they are actually defined in terms of inter-breeding populations. There’s nothing at the level of the individual organism that can tell you absolutely that all and only members of this category have precisely the same genetic material. We want to place individuals in categories and say, at some level they’re all the same, in this deep way. But just the way you get variability on the surface, you get variability all the way through.

But surely we need some measure of essentialism to cope with the world?

Essentialism has a lot of positive implications. You could say it’s one of the motivators for science. One of the reasons why we keep looking and digging for non-obvious similarities within a category is that we have this optimistic belief that the world has a lot of structure to it. That seems to be true. As far as we can tell, there is an awful lot of deep structure to the world, which goes beyond superficial appearances. That’s a very productive and positive feature of essentialism. What’s not so productive and positive is when we turn this lens on to thinking about social categories. A great example of that is when Larry Summers made those off-the-cuff comments about women at a conference a few years ago. If you read the transcript, which I did, he really made essentialist claims. He said that there are inherent differences between men and women that are responsible for women not reaching as high levels in academia and that he didn’t think factors like environment, or outward causes that aren’t located in the individual, had much weight. Interestingly, he also linked these [differences] to childhood. If something is really essential, it should be there from the beginning, it should be innate. It unfolds with development – it doesn’t come to be with development. It’s there all along, within the individual, just waiting for its expression. So he gave anecdotes from small children, where girls wanted to play with dolls, as evidence, as if these were relevant to his claims about the economic situation of women in academia.

Is the reason girls play with dolls just about environment then?

We over-essentialise, and I can point to places where people think there are absolute boundaries when there aren’t. Another great example is evolution. One reason people deny evolution is because they think it makes no sense for one category to shift into another category, because these are supposed to be absolutely bounded categories. Nonetheless, I do think that there are strong influences of genes as well as environment. It’s somewhat of an open issue as to why we get such strong gender-typed toy playing in children. There are definitely theories out there that would explain it in terms of innate propensities and there are other theories out there that would explain it in terms of identification with one gender category or another. So there’s a cognitive basis to it that’s then environmentally set.

Obviously there are differences between men and women, but in Larry Summers’s case you felt he was going too far?

Personally, I do. Obviously this is a matter of great debate. Steven Pinker and Liz Spelke, who were both at Harvard at the same time Summers was there, did these big public debates, with Pinker on the pro-Summers side, and Spelke on the anti-Summers side. I certainly wouldn’t say, “Oh, he’s the only person who holds that view.” A great book on this, by the way, which is not one of my five, is Why So Slow? by Virginia Valian. It’s wonderful. She takes as a phenomenon that women are underrepresented in the highest reaches of business and academia and so on. Based on very well-established [psychology] literature, she argues that small effects can accumulate to lead to large differences in outcome. Some are at the level of being discouraged, that sort of thing, some are at the level of unconscious bias. Small little effects, where you think this is just a little tweak, a little push here or there, cumulatively can lead to very different trajectories and outcomes. But yes, I think Summers was way too willing to adopt an essentialist view of gender differences and just dismiss alternative accounts.