Dr. Ilan Dar-Nimrod is an Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Sydney, and an expert on how people reason about genetic causes of behavior, the psychology of gender and sexuality, and the existential psychology of death.

In this episode we talk about psychological essentialism, the belief that people have an innate “essence,” and how over time, as society has become more secular, people have become genetically essentialist. We talk about how genetic essentialism is associated with more sympathy for wrongdoers, due to lower beliefs in free will. We also talk about how essentialism is associated with divisive groupthink, as in the case of gender and sexuality. Lastly, we talk about the relationship between essentialism and existentialism, noting that people who are more essentialist are more likely to believe in an inherent order to the world, while people who are more secular must grapple with finding their own meaning.