The Impact of Multi-Cultural Experience on Essentialist Thinking: The Comparison between Chinese and American College Students

Social Categories (Catholic, student, truck driver), despite being constructed, are often intuitively viewed as natural kinds. Such social essentialist thinking involves exaggerating differences between categories and homogeneity within categories, and can have powerful consequences (e.g., Prentice & Miller, 2007). However, little is known about predictors of individual differences in essentialist thinking. In this study, we focus on the impact of multicultural experience on shaping essentialist thinking about social categories. Specifically, we hypothesized that immersion in a different cultural context via study abroad could reduce essentialist thinking, by weakening assumptions about category boundaries and within group homogeneity.

To address this question, we recruited two groups of American college students (one studying abroad in China and the other studying locally in the U.S with minimal international experience) and two comparable groups of Chinese college students (one studying abroad in the U.S and the other studying locally in China with minimal international experience). We used a Switched-at-Birth Task and the Social Essentialism Scale (Haslam, 2000) as measures of essentialist thinking.

Results suggest that the effect of multicultural experience is different for U.S and Chinese students. Specifically, U.S students studying abroad showed lower levels of essentialist thinking than those studying in the U.S, whereas Chinese students studying abroad showed higher levels of essentialist thinking when compared to their compatriots studying at home. These results support the idea that multicultural experience has an impact on essentialist thinking about social categories. More importantly, it demonstrates that the nature of that impact may depend on the cultural background of the individual having the experience. Given that past findings on social essentialism has largely focused on Western samples, the current study addresses the importance of expanding this line of research to non-WEIRD populations.