Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Why do beliefs that gender differences are innate (i.e., gender essentialism) sometimes lead to normative judgments about how individual people ought to be? In the current study, we propose that a missing premise linking gender essentialism and normativity rests on the common folk-biological assumption that biological features serve a biological function. When participants (N = 289) learned that a novel feature of the gender category “mothers” was common and innate, they overwhelmingly assumed that it must have served some function across human history. When they learned that it served a historical function, they assumed that it must still be beneficial in today's environment. When participants learned that the feature was beneficial, they judged that contemporary mothers ought to have it, and they were more willing to intervene to ensure that they would by constraining the choices of individual mothers. Thus, we suggest that essentialist assumptions can shape normative social judgments via the explanations people tend to generate about why certain features of natural kind categories become common to begin with. This finding articulates one manifestation of the naturalistic fallacy, with implications for policy debates about bodily autonomy and choice.