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.

翻译：本质主义信念（即认为同一群体成员本质上相同）在社会刻板印象中扮演核心角色，若不加挑战可能造成伤害。本研究针对对抗本质主义信念（如“自由派是愚蠢的”）这一任务进行探索性分析。我们借鉴心理学与自然语言处理领域的既有研究，构建了五类反驳陈述，并通过人类实验评估不同策略的有效性。研究还探讨了本质主义信念表达显性程度对反驳策略选择的影响。结果表明，扩大刻板印象适用范围（例如针对其他群体，如“保守派也可能愚蠢”）的陈述是最受欢迎的抗辩策略。最后，我们讨论了该领域未来研究面临的挑战与开放性问题（如提升事实准确性、研究群体特异性差异），并强调了自然语言处理与心理学交叉研究的重要性。