MRPG: Perceived Entitativity and Implicit Judgments of Group Members

University Of Illinois At Urbana-Champaign, Urbana IL

Investigators

Abstract

People often encounter, observe, and interact with collections of other people. Such collections can vary in the extent to which they seem like single, unified entities. For example, a baseball team seems more group-like than an audience at a movie. The term "entitativity" is used to refer to the degree to which an aggregate possesses the features of a single, unified entity. This project examines the ways in which a group's degree of perceived entitativity affects the judgments that perceivers make about the group and its members. More specifically, the project looks at whether judgments of members are biased by the perceived entitativity of the group to which the members belong. Two studies test hypotheses regarding the role of perceived entitativity in the implicit judgments that are made of groups and group members. Study 1 tests the hypothesis that high perceived group entitativity increases the speed and likelihood of comparative judgments between group members. The expectations of coherence and unity that exist for highly entitative groups are predicted to lead to intragroup assimilation effects (perceiving group members as being more similar to each other than they really are), which can then facilitate comparative judgments along a focal dimension. Study 2 examines attentional and encoding biases produced by a group's perceived level of entitativity. It is proposed that expectations of high entitativity may lead perceivers to pay greater attention to shared versus non-shared features of group members. In addition, perceived entitativity may bias the encoding of new information about the group such that information that is consistent with perceivers' representation of the group (i.e., information that contributes to the belief that group members are similar and unified) will be more readily learned and retained in memory. By examining the role of perceived entitativity in group perception and judgment, it will be possible to gain greater understanding into both the conscious and non-conscious factors that influence perceivers' judgments of group members. This research also has implications for how higher-order social judgments of group members are formulated and the biases that may be present in these judgments.