This study aims to investigate how perceived social conflict affects essentialist thinking about social categories. It is hypothesized that perception of intense social conflict will increase essentialist thinking about categories involved in the conflict as well as those in the same dimension but not directly involved. The experiment will manipulate perception of conflict by having subjects view videos depicting conflicts between social groups. Subjects will then rate various social categories on measures of essentialist thinking. The results could help understand how social environmental factors influence social categorization.