Systematic Review of Essentialist Beliefs in Social Sciences (2014–2024): A Critical-Performative Approach to Their Production, Circulation, and Stabilization in Social Categories

This systematic review examines how students and teachers acquire, reproduce, and transform essentialist beliefs about social categories such as gender, race, class, and disability. These beliefs attribute fixed and natural characteristics to social groups, thereby contributing to the legitimization of social hierarchies from an early age. Unlike studies that focus on measuring these beliefs or analyzing their effects, this review examines the processes through which they emerge, circulate, and stabilize, especially in educational contexts. I analyzed 29 empirical studies published between 2014 and 2024, identified through a systematic search in Web of Science and Scopus and reported according to PRISMA guidelines. The corpus includes experimental, quasi-experimental, correlational, descriptive-comparative, and non-experimental studies, most of which use cross-sectional data. The findings were organized into three analytical dimensions: trajectories in the production of essentialist beliefs; sociocultural–institutional mechanisms of circulation and stabilization; and categorical approaches across social groups. The review shows that essentialist beliefs are not only individual cognitive dispositions, but are also shaped by educational practices, family narratives, media representations, scientific explanations, and broader sociocultural contexts. Overcoming essentialism requires not only new educational content, but also critical attention to the classificatory and epistemic frameworks through which social differences are made to appear natural, stable, and teachable.