  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.
