The Psychology of Group Perception

Vincent Yzerbyt, Charles M. Judd, Olivier Corneille, Vincent Yzerbyt, Charles M. Judd, Olivier Corneille

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Year: 2004
• Print ISBN: 9780415651158
• eBook ISBN: 9781135433109
• Topic: Psychologie
• Subtopic: Histoire et théorie en psychologie

This groundbreaking work by leading social psychologists, who have all contributed in important ways to the psychology of group perception, focuses in particular on three interrelated issues: (1) whether groups are seen to be diverse or relatively homogeneous; (2) whether groups are seen as real and stable or only transitory and ephemeral; and (3) whether group membership derives from some essential quality of the members or rather is based on social constructions.

1
Perceived Variability, Entitativity, and Essentialism
Introduction and Overview

VINCENT YZERBYT
Catholic University of Louvain at Louvain-la-Neuve
CHARLES M.JUDD
University of Colorado
OLIVIER CORNEILLE*
Catholic University of Louvain at Louvain-la-Neuve
*Also at the Belgian National Fund for Scientific Research

This his volume represents an attempt to provide an integration of three different lines of research in social psychology. These three are reflected in our choice of title: “Perceived Variability, Entitativity, and Essentialism.” Each of these three terms emerged from distinct lines of work, much of it done by contributors to this volume. As we will see, these three terms, when applied to the perception of social groups, refer to related concepts. Our goal in launching this volume was to clarify their definitions, their relations, their causes, and their consequences.

One line of work, the Entitativity part of our title, derives from a seminal theoretical article that Donald T.Campbell published in 1958 on the perceptual reality of social groups. He suggested that groups may vary in the extent to which they are perceived as being a “real thing” or an entity, and he coined the rather unfortunate term entitativity to refer to this characteristic. He went on to speculate about cues that perceivers might use to infer the entitativity of groups. Such cues were thought to include the extent to which group members are similar to each other, whether group members function in a coordinated manner in pursuit of shared goals, whether group membership is stable and group boundaries relatively fixed, and whether group members are physically near each other.

Although Campbell offered no data in support of his ideas about these perceptual cues, a number of subsequent researchers have carried his work on group entitativity forward (e.g., Abelson, Dasgupta, Park, & Banaji, 1998; Brewer & Harasty, 1996; Dasgupta, Banaji, & Abelson, 1999; Hamilton, Sherman, & Lickel, 1998; Lickel, Hamilton, Wieczorkowska, Lewis, Sherman, & Uhles, 2000; S.J.Sherman, Hamilton, & Lewis, 1999). This work has clearly demonstrated that indeed groups do differ in the extent to which they are perceived to be entities and that many of the perceptual cues that Campbell outlined are in fact attended to in forming such perceptions.

Independent of this work on groups as entities, stereotyping researchers have been interested in the strength of group stereotypes, focusing in particular on perceptions of group variability, the second term in our title. Presumably, if perceivers have particularly strong stereotypes about given social categories, then they should see relatively little diversity among the members of such categories. The attributes associated with the category as a whole should also be associated with nearly every category member, allowing strong inferences to be made from the group to individual members and vice versa.

Because of the fact that stereotypes have traditionally been associated with significant social categories (e.g., gender or ethnicity), nearly all of this work has focused on the perceived variability of such categories rather than other sorts of social groups (e.g., task groups, intimacy groups). Additionally, most of the work on perceived variability has focused on one particular determinant of perceived group variability, namely whether the target group is an ingroup or an outgroup. A robust, although not universal finding is the outgroup homogeneity effect, whereby perceivers judge ingroups to be more variable than outgroups (e.g., Judd & Park, 1988; Linville, Fischer, & Salovey, 1989; Park & Rothbart, 1982; Park & Judd, 1990; Quattrone & Jones, 1980). More recently, research has focused on the ways in which power, status, and category size (minority versus majority) may moderate these ingroup/outgroup differences in perceived variability (e.g., Simon & Brown, 1988; Lorenzi-Cioldi, 1988; Guinote, Judd, & Brauer, 2002).

The third line of work that we seek to integrate derives from work in cognitive and developmental psychology on categorization processes. This work has differentiated between two different kinds of categories, typically labeled natural kinds and human artifacts. The former are categories where there is an essence, often biological in nature, that defines and dictates category membership. The latter consists of categories that are constructed by perceivers in the absence of any inherent or biological basis for categorization. The prototypic natural kind category is a species (e.g., leopards, elephants). Human artifact categories are exemplified by object categories, such as chairs or tables. Cognitive and developmental psychologists have argued that perceivers routinely dis tinguish between these two different sorts of categories and reason about them in rather different ways (e.g., Gelman, 1988; Hirschfeld, 1996; Keil, 1989).

Based on this work, social psychologists have recently become interested in the extent to which social groups and categories are “essentialized” (the third term in our title) or seen as natural kinds. For instance, Rothbart and Taylor (1992) and Yzerbyt and colleagues (Yzerbyt, Corneille, & Estrada, 2001; Yzerbyt, Rocher, & Shadron, 1997; Yzerbyt & Rogier, 2001) have argued that perceivers often treat social categories as natural kinds, assuming there exists some underlying essence that unites category members. Haslam and colleagues (N.Haslam, 2002; N.Haslam, Rothschild, & Ernst, 2000) have explored the components and consequences of essentialized views of groups. And Levy, Plaks, and colleagues have examined individual differences in the tendency to see social categories as natural kinds (Levy, Plaks, Hong, Chiu, & Dweck, 2002; Levy, Stroessner, & Dweck, 1998; Plaks, Stroessner, Dweck, & Sherman, 2001).

A few years ago, when we decided to initiate this volume, it seemed evident to us that the central constructs from these three research traditions were related. Groups that were perceived as entities probably also were groups where the perception of variability was low and were also probably more likely to be essentialized. Yet the literature to integrate theoretically these three was remarkably absent. Our hope is that this volume now fills this void.

The chapters in this volume are grouped into two sets. Those in the first we consider to be more definitional and theoretical in nature. Here authors who have been active contributors to one or more of the above traditions have attempted to theoretically delineate these constructs and their interrelations. The chapters in the second set are a bit more empirically oriented, and they tend to explore the causes and consequences of entitativity, perceived variability, and essentialism in the perception of groups. In the sections that follow in this chapter, we briefly provide a road map for chapters in both sections. In so doing, we also hope to provide our own perspective on the theoretical integration of these three terms and their research traditions.

SECTION ONE: DEFINITIONAL CONSIDERATIONS

We see the chapters in this section as struggling with the issues of (a) what exactly do we mean by the terms perceived variability, entitativity, and essentialism, and (b) how are these related to each other, both theoretically and empirically. As will be clear on a close reading of these chapters, our authors have rather different perspectives on these two issues and argue for theoretical integration in rather different ways. Although this diversity ultimately threatens our goal of providing a quick and easy integration of these traditions and literatures, it does mean that the reader must attempt his or her own unique theoretical understanding, and we see this as a very positive outcome indeed.

The initial chapter in this section, by Marilynn Brewer, Ying-yi Hong, and Qiong Li, focuses in particular on one of the central attributes that D.T.Campbell (1958) recognized as a cue in the perception of entitativity: whether or not a group has a set of shared goals and purposes and acts in a coordinated manner toward those. Brewer et al. argue that the perception of similarity or homogeneity of group members is not a sufficient condition for the perception of group entitativity. Rather, entitativity is inferred either when the group is a seen as a natural kind (essentialized) or when it is seen as acting in a coordinated manner on common goals and purposes. And these two bases for the perception of entitativity have somewhat different consequences, with the perception of essence influencing more judgments about individual group members and the group prototype, and the perception of agency or common goals influencing emotional reactions to the group (and its purposes) as a whole.

Beyond these theoretical considerations, Brewer and colleagues report some data from cross-national samples in which perceptions of both a group essence and group agency are shown to predict judgments of entitativity. Although they report some cultural differences, the bottom line is that both are influential in both cultures.

Like Brewer et al., David Hamilton, Steven J.Sherman, and Julie S.Rodgers primarily focus on the perception of group entitativity and how it relates to the other constructs of essentialism and perceived homogeneity. They argue that these three concepts, while they are certainly positively correlated, are not redundant. Further they argue that the exact relations among them depend on the type and function of the group involved. Specifically, their empirical work has differentiated among social categories, task groups, intimacy groups, and loose associations (e.g., people waiting for a bus together), and the relative degree of entitativity, homogeneity, and essentiality for all four types of groups. They suggest that intimacy groups (e.g., families) are the highest on entitativity, but typically do not have strong stereotypes associated with them. They suggest that social categories may be essentialized, but they are actually fairly low on perceived variability compared to the other types of groups. For task groups, they argue that perceptions of entitativity are relatively high, but again essentialism and perceived homogeneity may be relatively lower than for other types of groups.

The bottom line in the Hamilton et al. chapter is that while these three constructs are related, they are clearly discriminable, with different causes and consequences. By focusing on the four different types of groups that their research has uncovered, they characterize the differences between entitativity, perceived homogeneity, and essentialism primarily by discussing how they vary (and covary) between types of groups, rather than how they vary (and covary) across groups within a given type. This is a somewhat different approach than that followed by the authors of the other chapters in this section.

The Brewer et al. and Hamilton et al. chapters seem most focused on entitativity and its relations to other constructs. Nick Haslam, Louis Rothschild, and Donald Ernst, on the other hand, clearly come out of the research tradition on essentialism and the properties that differentiate essentialized groups from groups that are less likely to be seen as “natural kinds.” They start their chapter with a fascinating tour of the history of thinking about essentialism, tracing the origin of the concept in the linguistic and philosophical traditions. They then report on a series of empirical studies that have explored the characteristics of essentialized groups. From this work, they argue that there are two components to essentialism, with groups varying more or less independently on them both. Characteristics included in the first component have to do with traditional notions of what constitutes a “natural kind”: they are groups that are immutable, natural, historically invariant, have sharp boundaries, and necessary features. The second component, they argue, is made up of characteristics traditionally associated with entitativity. Characteristics such as homogeneity, inductive potential (i.e., inferring what someone is like from group membership and vice versa), and membership based on shared inherent properties are associated with the second component.

Starting from a theoretical interest in defining the characteristics of essentialized groups, Haslam, Rothschild, and Ernst thus come to the conclusion that there are two components: one having to do with groups being seen as “natural kinds” and the other having to do with the perceived entitativity of groups. Thus, they see entitativity as one component of essentialism, and, within entitativity, perceived homogeneity is one factor that leads to the perception of entitativity. This is clearly, then, a sort of nested structure, with perceived homogeneity as a condition for entititativity and entitativity as a condition for essentialism.

While Brewer et al. and Hamilton et al. start from the point of view of explaining entitativity, and Haslam et al. start from the point of view of explaining essentialism, Mick Rothbart and Bernadette Park emerge much more squarely out of the stereotyping literature. Accordingly, their initial question is focused on the process by which stereotypes may be changed, and in this regard they necessarily focus on factors that affect whether individual group members who disconfirm a group stereotype will be functionally integrated into the group and thereby lead to change. They suggest that whether a disconfirming group members is functionally included in or excluded from the group depends on both the perceived variability of the group and the degree to which the group is seen as an entity. They further argue that entitativity is not simply the same thing as perceived variability. Group entitativity is also affected by the extent to which a group is seen as acting on common goals or its degree of agency (consistent with Brewer et al.). Finally, they suggest that essentialized groups are a subset of groups that are seen as entitative, having both high perceived similarity and a sense of agency.

All of this leads them to suggest that disconfirming group members will be functionally excluded, and stereotype change inhibited, when group boundaries are strong. And this is most likely to be the case in entitative groups that possess shared attributes and common goals, and are essentialized.

The final chapter in this section, by Vincent Yzerbyt, Claudia Estrada, Olivier Corneille, Eléonore Seron, and Stéphanie Demoulin, also starts by asserting that these three constructs are not one and the same thing. But they argue in particular for a different relationship between entitativity and essentialism than that articulated by others. They suggest that entitativity is the observable or phenotypic attribute of “groupness,” whereas group essence is the underlying or genotypic attribute that results in the phenotypic expression. They then show, in a series of reported studies, that when essentialism is manipulated, entitativity and perceived similarity are consequences. Thus, perhaps like Rothbart and Park, they suggest that essentialism is the most fundamental of the three concepts, that essentialism requires perceived similarity and entitativity, and that perceived similarity and entitativity are broader constructs and, as such, can be found with nonessentialized groups.

This brief summary of these chapters (admittedly not the summary that these authors themselves might have provided) clearly points to diversity in both the author’s starting points and the conclusions they eventually reach. Yet we believe that there are threads of consensus that are apparent across the chapters, and hopefully they show the way to a more integrative account of the theoretical relationships among entitativity, perceived variability, and essentialism.

First, no one argues that these are one and the same construct. Groups vary in the extent to which they are perceived to be real real or meaningful, the extent to which their members are seen to be diverse, and the extent to which they are seen to have an essence that defines them as a “natural kind.” Although these perceptions certainly covary, they are not one and the same thing.

A necessary corollary of this is that these three characteristics of groups have at least somewhat different causes and consequences. The factors that cause a group to be seen as entitative, that lead to perceptions of homogeneity, and that result in an essentialized view of group membership are not one and the same. And yet we would suggest that all three of these perceptions have the potential for influencing each other. Many of the studies that are summarized in these chapters suggest that each of these perceptions has potential implications for the others. Manipulations of essence lead to higher perceived similarity and higher entitativity. Groups that come to be seen as less variable are more likely to be seen as entitative, and so forth. Though not identical constructs, and though potentially having different causes and consequences, they nevertheless are causally related to each other. And the causal relations are certainly reciprocal and nonrecursive.

If we grant this, then the next obvious question concerns whether these constructs share a nested or hierarchical structure of relations or whether they are simply overlapping sets, capable of influencing each other in a probabilistic manner. Here, we are taken by many of the ideas contained in Figure 1 of Rothbart and Park. Consistent with Brewer et al., it seems that entitative groups derive their “realness” either from the perceptions of similarity of members or from a sense of agency and purpose. And the conjunction of the two is particu larly likely to lead to group entitativity. But essentialism seems to us to be more than just another partially overlapping set of groups. Groups that are essentialized seem to us to necessarily have a realness to them that cannot be denied, and that realness inevitably leads to strong and impermeable group boundaries with high perceived genotypic similarity.

In this sense, essentialism seems to have a rather different conceptual basis from the other two constructs, in that it implies attributional consequences that the other two do not. Perceived homogeneity focuses on the extent to which group members share attributes. Entitativity focuses on the extent to which a group is seen as real or coherent. Essentialism derives from both of these but it seems to us to imply more. It entails not just a description of a group and what makes it a group, but also a theory about why group membership matters and what it implies. If a group is essentialized, then we are permitted to make inferences about why this group exists (why it is an entity) and why group members are similar to each other. We are not saying simply that the group is an entity and that its members are similar, but we are implying an attributional process for the origins of entitativiy and similarity: this is a group and its members are similar to each other because they all share an essence that is invariant and unmutable. Essentiality, in other words is not just the conjunction of similarity and entitativity. It really implies a theory about the origins of similarity and entitativity. It implies that the perceiver has a “natural kind” explanation for the existence of the group and for why its members are similar to each other. It suggests that the perceiver attributes groupness and similarity to internal, dispositional, and immutable characteristics of group members.

Turning to the distinction made by Hamilton et al. among different types of groups, it seems to us particularly interesting that it is often social categories (rather than task groups or intimacy groups) that are imbued with essentialistic qualities. And then the interesting question for us concerns not the differences among these types of groups (categories versus intimacy groups versus task groups) but the conditions under which social categories are essentialized. This focus on social categories, and the question of when they are essentialized, enables us to effectively bridge the three diverse traditions that we identified at the start of this preface and that gave rise to our notions of entitativity, perceived variability, and essentialism. Strong stereotypes, prejudice, discrimination, and hostile intergroup relations have been issues at the core of social psychology since its founding. And from our point of view, notions of entitativity, perceived variability, and essentialism take on particular interest to the extent that they help us understand these social problems. Strong stereotypes occur when the members of social categories are viewed as very similar to one another and when the boundaries that differentiate those categories are seen as sharp and fixed. And then when perceivers go the additional step of essentializing those categories, then the definition of a social stereotype takes on a very different aspect: category membership becomes inevitable and immutable. Category members resemble each other because of their unchangeable and true essence. And the boundaries that divide groups and that lead to social conflict are seen as fixed forever as a natural part of the world, just like the lines that separate different species. Such essentialized social categories, it seems to us, are what leads to the most severe forms of intergroup conflict and hostility, and ethnic cleansing, or ethnic genocide, when it has occurred historically, has certainly been accompanied by an essentialistic rhetoric.

From this point of view, what becomes important is the evolution of essentialistic thinking about social categories: the factors that lead to more essentialistic views of social categories, given perceived entitativity and similarity. And this leads us to want to understand the dynamic relations among these constructs and the factors that lead to changes in all three, within the same social...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• ABOUT THE EDITORS
• CONTRIBUTORS
• PREFACE
• 1. PERCEIVED VARIABILITY, ENTITATIVITY, AND ESSENTIALISM: INTRODUCTION AND OVERVIEW
• SECTION 1: CONSTRUCTS AND DEFINITIONS
• SECTION 2: ANTECEDENTS AND CONSEQUENCES
• REFERENCES