Essentialism, or the belief that certain categories have fundamental, intrinsic, and stable essences, pervasively influences social judgments. Among the many groupings that describe people, gender is the most essentialized category yet relatively little is known about individual differences in gender essentialism. To explore this construct in Study 1 with 2996 U.S. participants, we developed a new measure, named the Gender Essentialism Measure (GEM), that offers two advantages over prior measures: (a) we used Item Response Theory to optimize the measure’s psychometrics and (b) we adopted a multidimensional conceptualization, incorporating four core facets of gender essentialism (Biological Determinism, Social Determinism, Immutability, and Inductive Potential). Study 2 used a large U.S. sample ( n = 2803) to characterize individual differences in essentialistic thinking about gender. Gender essentialism was associated with endorsement of sexism, system-justifying ideologies, relatively inflexible and dispositional thinking about others, and lesser empathic concern and perspective-taking. Studies 3 and 4, using samples of 133 and 118 U.S. participants, respectively, demonstrated that gender essentialism predicts greater acceptance of existing gender disparities. Our research indicates that understanding and addressing the societal and personal impact of gender stereotyping would benefit from going beyond sexism to also considering the role of essentialistic thinking about gender. The GEM offers researchers, practitioners, and policymakers a psychometrically optimized, multi-faceted tool to assess the extent and prevalence of gender-essentialistic beliefs.

中文翻译：

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用粉色和蓝色看世界：开发和探索关于性别的本质主义思考的新方法

本质主义，或认为某些类别具有基本的、内在的和稳定的本质的信念，普遍影响着社会判断。在描述人的众多分组中，性别是最本质化的类别，但对性别本质主义的个体差异知之甚少。为了在 2996 名美国参与者的研究 1 中探索这一结构，我们开发了一种名为性别本质主义测量 (GEM) 的新测量，它比之前的测量具有两个优势：(a) 我们使用项目反应理论来优化测量的心理测量学和 ( b) 我们采用了多维概念化，结合了性别本质主义的四个核心方面（生物决定论、社会决定论、不变性和归纳潜力）。研究 2 使用了一个大的美国 样本 (n = 2803) 来表征关于性别的本质主义思维的个体差异。性别本质主义与对性别歧视的认可、为系统辩护的意识形态、对他人的相对僵化和倾向性的思考以及较少的移情关注和观点采择有关。研究 3 和 4 分别使用了 133 和 118 名美国参与者的样本，表明性别本质主义预测对现有性别差异的接受程度更高。我们的研究表明，理解和解决性别刻板印象的社会和个人影响将受益于超越性别歧视而考虑性别本质主义思维的作用。GEM 为研究人员、从业人员和政策制定者提供了心理测量优化的、