# Towards Countering Essentialism through Social Bias Reasoning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.16173 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.16173/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 9 of its 42 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 28 Mar 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [The Woman Worked as a Babysitter: On Biases in Language Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.01326/) (2019)
- [Social Bias Frames: Reasoning about Social and Power Implications of Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.03891/) (2019)
- [Annotators with Attitudes: How Annotator Beliefs And Identities Bias Toxic Language Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.07997/) (2021)
- [A Benchmark Dataset for Learning to Intervene in Online Hate Speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.04251/) (2019)
- [CONAN -- COunter NArratives through Nichesourcing: a Multilingual Dataset of Responses to Fight Online Hate Speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.03270/) (2019)
- [Thou shalt not hate: Countering Online Hate Speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.04409/) (2018)
- [Generate, Prune, Select: A Pipeline for Counterspeech Generation against Online Hate Speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.01625/) (2021)
- [Penguins Don't Fly: Reasoning about Generics through Instantiations and Exceptions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11658/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Beyond Denouncing Hate: Strategies for Countering Implied Biases and Stereotypes in Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.00161/) (2023)
- [Challenging Negative Gender Stereotypes: A Study on the Effectiveness of Automated Counter-Stereotypes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.11845/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

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.