Essentialist Beliefs About Mental Disorders

Abstract

Fifty-eight undergraduates participated in an experimental study of beliefs about the nature of mental disorders. The study examined whether laypeople think about mental disorders in terms of underlying essences, and whether such “essentialist” beliefs guide their inferences about mental disorders. Participants read summaries of new scientific evidence purporting to show that particular disorders were more homogeneous, biologically-based, immutable, inductively potent, or sharply bounded than had previously been thought, and rated the extent to which this evidence altered their beliefs about the nature of the disorders. Consistent with our hypothesis, participants made wide-ranging essentialist inferences about disorders when specific essence-related beliefs were manipulated in this manner. In addition, participants' thinking about mental disorders was guided by a cluster of “natural kind” beliefs, which represent disorders as biologically-grounded, discrete, fixed, and historically invariant entities.

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