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.

研究如何打破社会刻板印象中的本质主义信仰，通过人类研究探讨不同类型的反驳策略的有效性，并发现扩大刻板印象范围的说法最受欢迎。