differenceblog: Essentialism

The Difference Blog by Dan4th (

differenceblog) wrote,
@ 2008-03-05 10:13:00

Entry tags:

femininity, masculinity, personality traits, philosophy, psychology

Essentialism

Smiler and Gelman: Masculine, feminine, and Neutral concepts

Smiler and Gelman (2008) examined the determinants of psychological essentialism in college students. They define essentialism in this context as the suggestion that "categories are stable, fixed at birth, and based on biological factors." Smiler and Gelman found greater essentialism among men (especially normatively masculine men) and greater essentialism for masculine concepts than feminine ones.

The terms in the table shown were used in the first of two studies, and were rated as masculine or feminine by 12 students unfamiliar with the main study. Study 1 participants were given nine prompts using these terms, along the lines of "Being X is a fixed property of an individual that doesn’t really change from"“…from childhood through adolescence,” “…from adolescence through early adulthood (e.g., 30s),” and “…from early adulthood (e.g., 30s) through old age.” Data from the "neutral" terms were not analyzed. In study 2, adjectives were more carefully matched to nouns (e.g. "a slut"/"promiscuous"; "a homosexual"/"gay"), and no neutral words were used.

Okay, I'm looking, but I'm not seeing how they found the "neutral" words, and I don't find them particularly neutral. But that's neither here nor there, and beside the point. This study caught my eye because of a really nice compliment I received a couple of weeks ago that Difference Blog was "rigorously and personally thoughtfully anti-essentialist." It sounded good, but honestly, I had no idea what essentialism was. Based on the definition used by Smiler and Gelman, I'd say my life is a study in anti-essentialism. I think I know this concept under the name "trait theory", and I've mentioned my understandable bias against it before (2/19/08). I consider personality changes to be not only possible, but more common than not. I'd be interested to hear whether any of you identify some of the words in Table 1 as stable, essential traits.

(Post a new comment)

	astrogeek01 2008-03-05 03:44 pm UTC (link)
	Maybe "neutral" meant as many people assigned said terms to male and female? totally guessing (Reply to this)(Thread)

differenceblog
2008-03-05 04:32 pm UTC (link)

It doesn't look, from the article, like the team of raters actually reviewed the "neutral words" -- I think that Smiler and Gelman may have actually just picked them, but that seems very silly. In the article, they say that they had 22 words used as masculine and feminine from another study, and then they gave them to 12 raters, ranked them most feminine to most masculine, and used the 8 most feminine and 8 most masculine. If they picked the neutral words from the middle, only 2 of their words would have been left out at all.

So, it went sort of like this:

Study 1
- Get list of psychological categories ("abstinent", "homosexual", etc)
- Give categories to raters (n = 12) and find which are rated most masculine and most feminine. (yields Table 1, above)
- Give most gendered categories (and neutral categories to throw them off) to 75 undergraduates and ask them to rate whether each categories is something that remains stable over a major life stage, or whether it's something that changes
- Look for reportable correlations

Study 2
- Make list of psychological categories - this time, they used carefully matched words that were not rated by students for genderedness (as far as I can tell). (see table 2, below)
- Ask 103 undergraduates whether these categories change over lifetime or not. Also give these students sexism and personality inventories.
- Look for reportable correlations

Table 2 - the categories used in study 2:

(Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

astrogeek01
2008-03-05 04:47 pm UTC (link)

I find it interesting that they limited the terms to the 8 most feminine/masculine. Any reason they did that? I mean woman -> feminine, and definitely feminine->feminine unless you have a particularly contrary person in the study. I'm not saying they should toss them out, but is there any reason they didn't include all 22? I mean, it's not like 22 is significantly higher than 16...

(Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	differenceblog 2008-03-05 04:50 pm UTC (link)
	Because they were looking for binary masculine/feminine categorization, not a continuum. Being that they were looking for extreme, binary examples, they should have used a smaller percentage of the terms, not a greater one. (Reply to this)(Parent)

pants_of_doom
2008-03-05 03:51 pm UTC (link)

I'm really surprised that "vegetarian" came up as neutral, given the number of people who've told me that only girls are vegetarians, and boys only do it if they want to impress a girl. And given the larger cultural "meat is manly!" messages.

As far as stability goes, i'd say that being outgoing and intelligent are largely stable, but I don't really get what's meant by "essential".

(Reply to this)(Thread)

differenceblog
2008-03-05 04:14 pm UTC (link)

Sorry, I should probably have noted up front that the reason I included the table was because their "neutral" words felt so very un-neutral to me - specifically "superstitious" and "vegetarian". The table is very confusing. Also, the term "career woman" in itself implies there's something unusual about being both a woman and in a career, and so calling that a "feminine" term seems... well, kind of fucking odd.

As for a brief definition of essentialism, I do want to stick to the definition used by Smiler and Gelman: "categories are stable, fixed at birth, and based on biological factors.

I guess to sum up, Psychological Essentialism (in this context) is the idea that your personality remains largely unchanged through your whole life, and is determined by your genes. Using the labels above, that's like saying that women who produce more testosterone are going to be more career-oriented. Or, like a recent Stuff article said: "According to British psychologist Professor John Manning, the length of your ring finger is a surefire way of determining your ability in sports."

(Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	pants_of_doom 2008-03-05 04:20 pm UTC (link)
	Aha. Phrenology returns. (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	differenceblog 2008-03-05 04:44 pm UTC (link)
	Hm. I should point out that the authors are NOT suggesting that any of these categories are stable or essential. As far as I can tell, they're anti-essentialist. These two studies are measuring determinants of essentialist belief -- what causes someone to hold these kinds of beliefs, and what kinds of traits are they likely to believe are stable this way? (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	astrogeek01 2008-03-05 04:48 pm UTC (link)
	That makes a lot more sense. (Reply to this)(Parent)

	differenceblog 2008-03-05 04:47 pm UTC (link)
	If I can make it clearer by the example of phrenology - Smiler and Gelman are saying that: 1. masculine men are more likely to believe in phrenology 2. Everyone is more likely to believe you can tell intelligence or homosexuality from phrenology than selflessness or promiscuity. (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	pants_of_doom 2008-03-05 05:01 pm UTC (link)
	Okay, I'm following this. Thanks for the explanations, I don't know why this has been so hard to wrap my brain around. (Reply to this)(Parent)

	astrogeek01 2008-03-05 04:39 pm UTC (link)
	I like this even less than before, now that you've explained it in more detail. Too many of the words are, as you say, intrinsically suggestive of one thing or another. And whether or not people think something is "stable" over someone's life doesn't mean that it is stable. (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	differenceblog 2008-03-05 04:41 pm UTC (link)
	I don't think they're saying that at all. As far as I can tell, the authors are anti-essentialist. This is a study of what causes certain kinds of beliefs in 18-22 year olds. (Reply to this)(Parent)

	differenceblog 2008-03-05 04:54 pm UTC (link)
	So, to get back to my original reader question: You do think that intelligence and outgoingness are stable personality traits? You don't think these are likely to change over the lifespan? Can you think of a non-biological reason that they would be stable? (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

astrogeek01
2008-03-05 05:57 pm UTC (link)

Intelligence: I have no idea how we could even measure this in a "stable" way. I don't really see any way to define it in a way that could be stable; people learn, and therefore become more intelligent. Is there an intrinsic amount of "intelligence" that someone has, which might put a limit on how much they could learn? Possibly, but it's going to be so swamped by Everything Else (such as culture, access to learning, parents, teachers, etc) that effectively the answer is not really (except maybe in extreme cases).

Outgoingness: This is something I've directly observed to change in people, I don't see how that can possibly be stable. I think that some people may not change *much* - if you're really outgoing, there are probably not many incentives to be less outgoing. If you're less outgoing, it may be harder to become more outgoing unless you put in an effort. But people can, and do, change naturally as circumstances and confidence change.

The only one that I can see up there in the masculine/feminine lists that is likely to be stable over someone's life is "homosexual". (also interesting to me that this is ranked as masculine, but I guess most people would use 'lesbian' for a female homosexual)

Interestingly, I think some of the neutral ones are more likely to be stable. If one is lazy, for example, one is not likely to try to change out of being lazy, unless there is some major external factor to push it ;) "Superstitious" at least in this country seems to have a very large contingent of people under its sway, sadly. Vegetarian I would think is not so stable; people go in and out of that. "American", well... unless you move to another country and disavow the American-ness of you, that's not likely to change. Immigrants, though, obviously would change to being American.

(Reply to this)(Parent)

mbigmistake
2008-03-05 05:59 pm UTC (link)

I'm kinda confused about what exactly happened in this study (I seem to be confused a lot lately), as to your question...I don't really think that any of those terms are set in stone....a few are borderline...
intelligent, outgoing, selfless being the ones that stick out for me as less changing...but even those can change, I think. Not just from stage to stage in life, but even from day-to-day or topic-to-topic.

I used to be a pretty big believer in the gay-as-genetic idea...but as I get older and less fearful of my own feelings...I think that most things are fluid and a combination of biology and experience...destiny and choice. It bothers me more and more if something is only considered okay if we have no choice in the matter.

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differenceblog
2008-03-05 06:04 pm UTC (link)

..I don't really think that any of those terms are set in stone..

I think the main prediction of this study (that masculine men are more likely to hold essentialist beliefs) would be really hard to test on Dblog, since I would be VERY surprised to find either of the following well represented in the readership:

1. Masculine men
2. people with essentialist beliefs.

I think that was largely what this post was trying to say, but based on the amount of explaining I had to do (see comments) I think I said it poorly.

(Reply to this)(Parent)

dancingwolfgrrl
2008-03-05 06:05 pm UTC (link)

There is basically nothing I'm willing to attribute confidently to biological factors, and I find this an important part of essentializing gender: it typically asserts not just a functional but a *necessary* relationship between physical or biological markers of sex (insert obligatory note about the contested nature of such things here) and non-physical traits. In this way, it draws patently false and extremely problematic correlations, masking them in relatively acceptable language by eliding the step where your sex + cultural conditioning + performance makes your gender.

One fun game to play in gender studies classes is to substitute the most typical physical characteristics of maleness and femaleness for "men" and "women" in rephrasing your classmates' sentences, particularly those that begin with "men/women are ______." For example, "women are selfless" can be rephrased as "so you're saying that having a uterus makes you selfless?" (This also works sometimes with other identities, although I'm still working on a good application for SES, as the phrase "so you're saying being poor makes you X?" still appears widely acceptable.)

(Reply to this)(Thread)

	differenceblog 2008-03-05 06:10 pm UTC (link)
	me: "Women are selfless" you: "So you're saying having a uterus makes you selfless?" me: "So you're saying having a uterus makes you a woman?" ;) (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

dancingwolfgrrl
2008-03-05 06:46 pm UTC (link)

This is a major flaw of this plan, because of course I think what makes you a woman is self-identification. But I have not yet found a slick way to debunk sex-gender linkage *and* gender-trait linkage simultaneously.

(Also, as a subsidiary problem, if you say to most undergrads "so you're saying having a uterus makes you a woman?" they look blankly at you and say "um, yes." I seriously have no clue how to even start there on a systematic level, although I always try to explain it when it comes up in practice.)

(Reply to this)(Parent)

kementari2
2008-03-05 06:30 pm UTC (link)

I appreciate the impetus behind thought exercises like that, but it really downplays the complexities of gender by confusing causality. Here's an example of another logically spurious response:

"People of European or Asian descent are more likely to get osteoporosis."
"So you're saying that having light skin makes you more likely to get osteoporosis?"

Of course skin color does not affect bones, but there is a correlation between the two because both are affected by race (I do understand that race categories are arbitrary).

(Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	dancingwolfgrrl 2008-03-05 07:11 pm UTC (link)
	Right. I think the value of this response is that generally people aren't saying that having a uterus makes you X (and in fact, I nearly universally believe that it doesn't make you anything in particular), and so it highlights the spuriousness of an apparently reasonable statement. (Reply to this)(Parent)

mbigmistake
2008-03-05 06:12 pm UTC (link)

More after reading other's comments:

There are some problems with defining some of these terms.

For instance, the outgoing thing.

I consider myself a pretty die-hard introvert. I've always thought that, but in recent years I've read a little bit about the "official characteristics" of introverts. Two of those...gets energy from within and feeling exhausted from interactions with other, especially groups, have held true for me. I don't like being the certain of attention.

But...all my life I've been a leader...I'd say somewhat by accident. I've done lots of activities and I always seem to float to the top. When I need to, I can do public speaking or lead a group. I don't like it, though, and it doesn't feel natural, even though it always happens. Is that outgoing? I don't know. Outgoing...I'll call that a cheerleader type of person. That's not me.

So I'd consider myself, from birth, NOT an outgoing person. But in certain circumstances, I can BE outgoing, if you want to call it that.

Race...that would have been a good non-changing quality.

(Reply to this)(Thread)

	dan4th 2008-03-05 06:14 pm UTC (link)
	Race...that would have been a good non-changing quality. insert Michael Jackson joke here (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	mbigmistake 2008-03-05 06:31 pm UTC (link)
	Another point the study could have made...are masculine men more likely to feel there is a set definition for traits...like "outgoing"? Waffling on definitions as feminine? Am I a girlie-man?!?!?!?!?!? (trick question) (Reply to this)(Parent)

imdissertating
2008-03-06 04:10 am UTC (link)

oh boy, this is right up my alley! I would say that *sometimes* you are essentialist in this journal because you're reporting on sex differences as rooted in biology. A number of the studies you report say that women are like this and men are like that. This is an essentialist argument. However, you debunk some of these studies. I'm very anti-essentialist myself so I notice these things.

But, on to the study at hand... I agree, superstitious is a decidedly NOT neutral term as women are coded in this way more often.

(Reply to this)

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