Nowadays, one of the main problems of our societies is to fight against the negative effects of stereotypes, prejudices and social exclusion. One of the greatest challenges faced by anyone doing research on this topic is related to the role played by the categorical essentialist thinking. The main objective of this paper is to present the results of the essentialization of race as a social category. 101 Brazilians and 138 Spaniards took part in this study. The results obtained showed a clear effect of the country and the hegemony of the category on the level of essentialization. The analysis of the explanations used by the participants allows us to conclude that within common sense theories, internal causes were the ones most frequently pointed out, causal history was predominantly adopted to explain changes in behavior and, finally, situational pressures were presented to explain, preferably, stability in behavior.
Essentialism; naturalization; entitatividade; race relations
