The DOI matches its Crossref record; 175 of the 175 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
Genetic essentialism: On the deceptive determinism of DNA.
Open accessAbstract
This article introduces the notion of genetic essentialist biases: cognitive biases associated with essentialist thinking that are elicited when people encounter arguments that genes are relevant for a behavior, condition, or social group. Learning about genetic attributions for various human conditions leads to a particular set of thoughts regarding those conditions: they are more likely to be perceived as (a) immutable and determined, (b) having a specific etiology, (c) homogeneous and discrete, and (d) natural, which can lead to the naturalistic fallacy. There are rare cases of "strong genetic explanation" when such responses to genetic attributions may be appropriate; however, people tend to overweigh genetic attributions compared with competing attributions even in cases of "weak genetic explanation," which are far more common. The authors reviewed research on people's understanding of race, gender, sexual orientation, criminality, mental illness, and obesity through a genetic essentialism lens, highlighting attitudinal, cognitive, and behavioral changes that stem from consideration of genetic attributions as bases of these categories. Scientific and media portrayals of genetic discoveries are discussed with respect to genetic essentialism, as is the role that genetic essentialism has played (and continues to play) in various public policies, legislation, scientific endeavors, and ideological movements in recent history. Last, moderating factors and interventions to reduce the magnitude of genetic essentialism, which identify promising directions to explore in order to reduce these biases, are discussed.
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Cites
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The essence of innocence: Consequences of dehumanizing Black children.
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Problems with Using Polygenic Scores to Select Embryos
Turley, P., Meyer, M. N., Wang, N., Cesarini, D., Hammonds, E., Martin, A. R., Neale, B. M., Rehm, H. L., Wilkins-Haug, L., Benjamin, D. J., et al. (2021) · New England Journal of Medicine · doi:10.1056/nejmsr2105065 · Cited by 187
“One particularly relevant misconception is “genetic determinism”: potential customers may expect that ESPS guarantees the outcome they want.(12) Furthermore, people tend to neglect variance,(13) and polygenic scores do not capture all sources of genetic variation.”
Background
Metadata
- Authors
- Dar-Nimrod, I., & Heine, S. J.
- Venue
- Psychological Bulletin
- Published
- 2011-09
- Volume
- 137
- Issue
- 5
- Pages
- 800-818
- ISSN
- 0033-2909 (ISSN-L)
- 1939-1455
- OpenAlex
- W2169627183
- Cited by
- 745
- References
- 175
- FWCI
- 8.55
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
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Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
