Psychological essentialism is the belief that some internal, unseen essence or force determines the common outward appearances and behaviours of category members. Even as children, we intuitively think that dogs have a ‘doggie’ essence, which makes them different from cats, who have a ‘catty’ essence. There are, of course, genetic mechanisms to explain the difference between dogs and cats, but well before mankind had made the discoveries of modern biology, people thought in terms of essences. In fact, the Greek philosopher Plato talked about the inner property that made things what they truly were. Even though individuals may not be able to say exactly what an essence is, there is a belief that there is something deep, internal and unalterable that makes an individual who they are. In this sense, it is a psychological placeholder to explain membership of one category as opposed to another.64
Child psychologist Susan Gelman from the University of Michigan has shown that psychological essentialism operates in young children’s reasoning about many aspects of the living world.65 By four years of age, they understand that raising a puppy in a litter of kittens will not make the puppy grow up into a cat.66 They understand that while a stick insect may look like a stick, it is really an insect.67 Both children and adults expect animals to maintain their identity even if external superficial features are changed. They increasingly learn to go over and beyond outward appearances when judging the true nature of things.
This explains why adults are reluctant to receive organ transplants from those that they perceive as bad. Children also develop this essentialist view. When asked about whether they would be changed by a heart transplant, six- to seven-year-olds, but not four-year-olds, thought that they would become either more or less mean and either more or less smart, depending on the psychological level of the donor.68
Essentialism develops well into adulthood when it comes to categorizing others into different social groups.69 The Nazis under the guidance of Joseph Goebbels were expert at producing propaganda that demonized the persecuted as inferior, but such indoctrination was not necessary. As soon as we make a distinction between ‘us’ and ‘them’, people assume the contrasts are intrinsic, fundamental and incommensurable – they are essentially different. By adopting an essentialist perspective, we are evoking a deeper level of justification for our prejudice. We do not want to touch them. We want to keep our distance. We are making judgements about their core features because they are ‘bad to the bone’. The extent to which we think of ourselves and others as possessing qualities that define who we are is a mark of our essentialist bias – a prejudice operating early in our development but one that appears to strengthen as we grow older. Psychologist Gil Diesendruck has been studying essentialist reasoning in children raised in Israel from different groups: secular Jews, Zionist Jews and Muslim Arabs. He found that by the time they are five years old, children already use category membership to make inferences about other children’s personalities based on prejudice which strengthen as they grow older.70
Eventually, essentialism becomes enshrined in the moral codes that keep people segregated. In biological reasoning, essentialism is a useful way of categorizing the world but it is one that can be easily corrupted by those who have a prejudicial axe to grind. What is remarkable is that humans seem trip-wired to generate these distinctions and hold them without any reasonable evaluation. There is something very automatic about group membership and one of the best examples of this rapid processing is when we suddenly become aware that we have been excluded.
Social death
One day, psychologist Kip Williams from Purdue University was out walking his dog in the park when he was accidentally hit in the back with a Frisbee. He picked it up and flipped it back to the two men who had been playing, and, to his surprise, they tossed it back to Williams. Soon, he found himself enjoying an impromptu game of Frisbee with two strangers. However, this newfound friendship was short-lived. After a minute or two, the two strangers resumed passing it between themselves without any explanation or goodbyes. Williams felt hurt. He had been excluded.
What shocked Williams was his automatic reaction to this innocuous event, the pain of rejection, and how fast it kicked in. It was a humiliating experience but one that gave him a great idea. He went on to develop a computer simulation called Cyberball, where participants play a game in which a ball is tossed back and forth on a screen between two other playmates. Just as in his Frisbee experience, the computer includes the player for varying amounts of time and then unexpectedly excludes the player. At this point, players feel rejected. Not only that, but they feel physically hurt, which registers in the pain centres.71 When adults played Cyberball in a brain scanner and they were excluded, their ACC, the region associated with physical pain, was activated. Their feelings were really hurt. But it also hurts to hurt others. Using the same paradigm, a recent study has shown that being forced to ostracize others is upsetting too.72 People who were instructed to ignore others that they had just been playing with felt bad. We don’t like to be made to ignore others.
Research with Cyberball reveals how easy it is to induce social pain but why should social exclusion be painful? Most pain reactions are to warn the body that damage has taken place or is about to take place. One idea is that social isolation is so damaging that we have evolved mechanisms to register when we are in danger of being ostracized.73 This registers as pain to trigger a set of coping mechanisms to reinstate ourselves back into the social situation that threatens to expel us. As soon as it becomes clear that we are in danger of being ostracized, we activate social ingratiating strategies. We become extra helpful, going out of our way to curry favour with individuals within the group. We can become obsequious, agreeing and sucking up to others even when they are clearly in the wrong.
This is the initial response to ostracism, but if the reintegrating strategies fail, then a much more sinister, darker set of behaviours can appear. For many, the attempts to rejoin the group are replaced by aggression against the group. This aggression has been studied experimentally in a version of Milgram’s shock experiment where participants believed that they were administering painful noise. Participants were asked to select an initial level of noise that ranged from 0dB to 110dB to be administered to other subjects. Prior to making their selection, they were told that increasing levels were more uncomfortable and 110dB was the maximum level. When some subjects, who in reality were experimenter confederates, rejected the real participant in a sham ostracism scenario prior to the test, he or she wreaked revenge by administering more painful sound bursts in retaliation to the others.74 If the participant did not perceive the others as a group, they administered lower painful bursts.
Sometimes victims can be entirely innocent. In another ostracism experiment, rejected individuals spiked the food of the next participant in the study with unpleasant hot sauce even when they knew they were innocent.75 It is the experimental equivalent of the displacement aggression when someone kicks their dog out of spite when things have gone wrong elsewhere in their lives. For many, aggression seems to be a way of getting back at an unjust world when they feel they have been injured by the thoughts and actions of others. For a few, this impulse towards revenge can be taken to the ultimate extreme.
The ultimate act of spite
Oh the happiness I could have had mingling among you hedonists, being counted as one of you, only if you did not fuck the living shit out of me … Ask yourself what you did to me to have made me clean the slate.’