Dimensions of Psychological Essentialism and Attitudes Toward Sexual Diversity

Santos, Jean Jesus
van Anders, Sari M.
Cerqueira-Santos, Elder

Department of Psychology, Federal University of Sergipe
Department of Psychology, Queen’s University
Department of Gender Studies, Queen’s University
Centre for Neuroscience Studies, Queen’s University

Charlotte Tate served as action editor.

Jean Jesus Santos is now at Department of Psychology, Queen’s University.

The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. This work was supported by the Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (Ministry of Education, Brazil; Grant 001). This work was also supported by a Canada 150 Research Chair to Sari M. van Anders. The authors declare that there are no conflicts of interest. The data supporting the findings of this study are not in any public repository; however, they are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.

Jean Jesus Santos served as lead for conceptualization, data curation, formal analysis, investigation, methodology, project administration, resources, software, and writing–original draft. Sari M. van Anders served as lead for writing–review and editing. Elder Cerqueira-Santos served in a supporting role for conceptualization and writing–review and editing. Jean Jesus Santos and Sari M. van Anders contributed equally to funding acquisition. Sari M. van Anders and Elder Cerqueira-Santos contributed equally to supervision.

Jean Jesus Santos, Department of Psychology, Queen’s University, 62 Arch Street, Kingston, ON K7L 3N6, Canada [email protected]

Received July 19, 2024

revised July 28, 2025

Accepted August 16, 2025

Psychology of Sexual Orientation and Gender Diversity Publish Ahead of Print, September 29, 2025. | DOI: 10.1037/sgd0000877

Essentialist thinking is commonly associated with prejudice; however, how these interrelate is not fully understood. We investigated how different dimensions of psychological essentialism (naturalness, discreteness, homogeneity, and informativeness) might be associated with attitudes toward sexual diversity, taking into account the effect of individual differences, including sexual orientation/identity. This study used a cross-sectional design; participants (N = 868) completed measures of essentialist beliefs and attitudes toward sexual diversity, and data were analyzed through structural equation modeling. Results showed that the discreteness dimension was associated with more negative attitudes toward sexual diversity overall, even when controlling for the effect of political conservatism, religiosity, individual income, schooling, and age as covariates and regardless of the sexual orientation/identity of individuals. In contrast, results for naturalness and homogeneity dimensions varied according to the sexual orientation/identity of individuals and attitudes toward sexual diversity. Our findings show how different essentialist beliefs may relate to attitudes toward sexual diversity even when research considers the effect of important individual differences, and help to explain their associations with sexual prejudice.