The purpose of this study is to examine how cultural and biological essentialism plays a role in people’s decision-making in social situations. The goal of the study is to assess the implicit choices that people make when interacting with individuals from various social groups. Participants will answer questions about their behaviors in a hypothetical social gathering scenario, including what questions they would choose to ask people from various group identities. We predict that people will ask more intimate questions of members from the same group as their own. We will also ask about how the hypothetical interactions made participants feel. Further, we will include measures of underlying prejudice and racial essentialist beliefs to determine whether these socio-cognitive processes affect people’s decisions. 

We hypothesize that people with higher levels of racial and cultural essentialism will correlate with higher levels of prejudice and that both these variables will play a role in their behavior in the party scenario. Our findings will provide greater insight into how prejudice and essentialist beliefs guide our behaviors in everyday scenarios. They can also be used to ease and promote cross-cultural interactions in both academic and social contexts, providing us with a better understanding of how and why essentialist beliefs affect our interactions with others. 

Lyla Blanchard, Eckerd College, Psychology and Animal Studies Discipline

Lucas Berglund, Eckerd College, Psychology Discipline 

Gracie Barrentine, Eckerd College, Psychology and Animal Studies Discipline 

Kendall Drummond, Eckerd College, Psychology Discipline

Cristian Montes De Oca, Eckerd College, Psychology Discipline

Skyler Gionfriddo, Eckerd College, Psychology and Animal Studies Discipline

Madison McCune, Eckerd College, Biology Discipline

Dr. Jessica Leffers, Eckerd College, Psychology Discipline