Towards Countering Essentialism through Social Bias Reasoning

Emily Allaway, Nina Taneja, Sarah-Jane Leslie, Maarten Sap

Abstract:

Essentialist beliefs (i.e., believing that members of the same group are fundamentally
alike) play a central role in social stereotypes
and can lead to harm when left unchallenged.
In our work, we conduct exploratory studies
into the task of countering essentialist beliefs
(e.g., “liberals are stupid”). Drawing on prior
work from psychology and NLP, we construct
five types of counterstatements and conduct
human studies on the effectiveness of these different strategies. Our studies also investigate
the role in choosing a counterstatement of the
level of explicitness with which an essentialist belief is conveyed. We find that statements
that broaden the scope of a stereotype (e.g., to
other groups, as in “conservatives can also be
stupid”) are the most popular countering strategy. We conclude with a discussion of challenges and open questions for future work in
this area (e.g., improving factuality, studying
community-specific variation) and we emphasize the importance of work at the intersection
of NLP and psychology.