Implicit Essentialism: Genetic Concepts Are Implicitly Associated with Fate Concepts Wren A. Gould, Steven J. Heine* Psychology Department, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada Abstract Genetic essentialism is the tendency for people to think in more essentialist ways upon encountering genetic concepts. The current studies assessed whether genetic essentialist biases would also be evident at the automatic level. In two studies, using different versions of the Implicit Association Test [1], we found that participants were faster to categorize when genes and fate were linked, compared to when these two concepts were kept separate and opposing. In addition to the wealth of past findings of genetic essentialism with explicit and deliberative measures, these biases appear to be also evident with implicit measures Citation: Gould WA, Heine SJ (2012) Implicit Essentialism: Genetic Concepts Are Implicitly Associated with Fate Concepts. PLoS ONE 7(6): e38176. doi:10.1371/ journal.pone.0038176 Editor: Tiziana Zalla, Ecole Normale Supe´rieure, France Received March 7, 2012; Accepted May 4, 2012; Published June 7, 2012 Copyright: 2012 Gould, Heine. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Funding: This research was funded by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada, Grant 410-2011-0409. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. * E-mail: heine@psych.ubc.ca Introduction Genes play an influential role in human development by predisposing individuals toward particular outcomes in their lives. Media coverage of genes tends to overstate this influence, though. For instance, the media frequently reports on the strong causal influence that the DRD4 gene has on novelty-seeking behaviours [2,3]. However, meta-analyses reveal that it’s relation with novelty-seeking yields is less than d = 10, suggesting that the relationship isn’t particularly strong and the evidence is all correlational [4,5]. These instances may not only be examples of sensationalist media reporting. Instead, they may provide a glimpse of a potent cognitive bias–genetic essentialism. Genetic essentialism is the tendency to think in more essentialist ways upon encountering genetic attributions [6]. Essences are the perceived pith that inheres within living creatures which makes them as they are [7,8,9,10]. Insofar as underlying processes are difficult to observe, material placeholders may be recruited to better understand internal processes. Genes are especially appro- priate essence placeholders because they are perceived as immutable, fundamental, homogenous, discrete, and natural [6]. Hence, when people encounter genetic attributions, they may view associated characteristics in more essentialist ways. Rather than seeing genes as simply factors that predispose individuals to particular outcomes, people often see genes as determining outcomes [11]. Although there are monogenic phenomena in which genes do have a deterministic relation with the phenotype (such as with Huntington’s disease), this is the exception. More commonly, multiple genes are probabilistically associated with a phenotype, and their expression is dependent upon environ- mental events. In particular, it is highly unlikely that psychological traits would be a function of just a few genes [12]. In these cases, genes do not have a deterministic relation with phenotypes, and it is inappropriate to assume that they do. Viewing genes in fatalistic ways may have undesirable consequences [6]. For instance, people may see genes as absolving people of responsibility for their actions, and even of their crimes [13,14]. Genetic explanations for group differences also reduce math performance for women [15], and can enhance stereotyping [11,16]. Although it is theoretically possible that other concepts could also serve as essence placeholders, genes may be uniquely apt placeholders. Some researchers suggest that essentialism is a potent form of folk-biology, and that it derives from an evolved understanding of living kinds that was adaptive in our ancestral past; that is, essentialism may act as an adaptive mechanism to understand biological inheritance [17,18]. Consistent with this theory, children reason in essentialist ways, expecting one’s rearing to be of little consequence for one’s innate behaviour [19]. To the extent that this is true, material biology may be an ideal placeholder for folk biological concepts. People may turn to biological matter as a ready instantiation of essences before recruiting other kinds of placeholders (e.g., socialization). Although there is some evidence that environmental influences, like socialization, may be interpreted as having an impact on the phenotype in essentialist ways [20], individuals more often appear to think of environmental influences as lying outside the self, and reflecting one’s choices [13,15]. Because genes are so chronically associated with determined outcomes, other explanations may be seen as more linked to undetermined, chosen outcomes. Since genes may non-arbitrarily relate to fatalistic outcomes, it seems plausible that the connection between implicit genetic perceptions and fate may be automatic, especially when compared to other implicitly perceived explanations, such as socialization. It is important to identify which implicit associations exist with genetic concepts in order to develop a rich understanding of the associative network that may predispose individuals to genetic essentialist biases. The vast literature on implicit cognition has PLoS ONE | www.plosone.org 1 June 2012 | Volume 7 | Issue 6 | e38176