ArticlePerspectives on psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science2022
Illusory Essences: A Bias Holding Back Theorizing in Psychological Science.
Article in Perspectives on psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 11 papers.
What it found
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Who cites it
11 citing papers in PubMed.
- Is There a Core Deficit in Autism Spectrum Disorder? An Analysis of CPEP-3 Assessment Data from 543 Children With Autism.Journal of autism and developmental disorders · 2026Article
- The Online Misinformation Susceptibility Scale: Development and Initial Validation.Healthcare (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Issues in Grounded Cognition and How to Solve Them - the Minimalist Account.Journal of cognition · 2025Article
- The Misinformation Susceptibility Test (MIST): A psychometrically validated measure of news veracity discernment.Behavior research methods · 2024Article
- Psychological construction as a theoretical principle for guiding cognitive-behavioral treatments.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Article
- Strategies, debates, and adversarial collaboration in working memory: The 51st Bartlett Lecture.Quarterly journal of experimental psychology (2006) · 2023Article
- Hate crime towards minoritized groups increases as they increase in sized-based rank.Nature human behaviour · 2022Article
- As soon as there was life, there was danger: the deep history of survival behaviours and the shallower history of consciousness.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Computational Psychiatry Needs Time and Context.Annual review of psychology · 2022Review
- Can we get human nature right?Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2021Article
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Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The reliance in psychology on verbal definitions means that psychological research is unusually moored to how humans think and communicate about categories. Psychological concepts (e.g., intelligence, attention) are easily assumed to represent objective, definable categories with an underlying essence. Like the "vital forces" previously thought to animate life, these assumed essences can create an illusion of understanding. By synthesizing a wide range of research lines from cognitive, clinical, and biological psychology and neuroscience, we describe a pervasive tendency across psychological science to assume that essences explain phenomena. Labeling a complex phenomenon can appear as theoretical progress before there is sufficient evidence that the described category has a definable essence or known boundary conditions. Category labels can further undermine progress by masking contingent and contextual relationships and obscuring the need to specify mechanisms. Finally, we highlight examples of promising methods that circumvent the lure of essences and suggest four concrete strategies for identifying and avoiding essentialist intuitions in theory development.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the Socratic graph.