Group entitativity and group perception: associations between physical features and psychological judgment.

Two experiments tested whether the perceived entitativity of groups (i.e., cohesiveness) influences judgments about those groups, in terms of both their observable physical properties and underlying psychological traits. Entitativity was manipulated with groups whose members were similar or dissimilar in skin color. Experiment 1 demonstrated that beliefs about entitativity elicited more accurate judgments of skin color for entitative than nonentitative social groups, although memory for individual members of entitative groups was relatively impoverished. Experiment 2 revealed that entitative groups were viewed as not only physically similar but also psychologically homogeneous and elicited strong negative trait and behavioral judgments. Together, these findings suggest that physical properties (e.g., similarity) can create perceptions of psychological "groupness" that have important consequences for group perception.

Perceptions of the collective other.

It is contended that perceptions of groups are affected by particular variables that do not apply to individuals (e.g., intragroup similarity and proximity). Importantly, the perception of outgroup threat has incomplete analogs at the individual level. Results from 3 studies support predictable distinctions between representations of individuals and of groups. Study I showed that priming of the word they produces more extreme negative judgments of the protagonist(s) in a story about 4 individuals acting jointly than in the same story with a single person acting alone. The opposite result holds for priming with the word he. Study 2, with Korean participants, demonstrates that actions by individuals or groups elicit differing preferences for redress. Individual responses (e.g., getting mad) to an individual racial insult (e.g., a snub by a waitress) are preferred to collective responses (e.g., circulating a petition), whereas the reverse preferences hold for a group insult (e.g., taunts from a gang of White youths). In Study 3, cues to the sensitivity of a group are introduced. This concept, introduced by Donald Campbell (1958), distinguishes different degrees of "groupness." Visual depictions of collections of unfamiliar humanoid creatures (greebles) were used to convey that they were either similar or dissimilar and either proximate or scattered. Results confirm the expectation that similarity and proximity-two entitive conditions-elicit more negative judgments of the group. Attention to other cues for entitivity may enrich social psychological views of stereotyping and prejudice by focusing on perceptions of groups as coordinated actors with the potential to bring about negative consequences. Such experiments point to the need for greater research focus on the vastly understudied but fundamental problem of the social cognition of group behavior.

Memory connections between thematically similar episodes.

Recent theories about the representation of thematic information in memory propose that two episodes that share a theme are connected together through a thematic structure. We investigated the use of such cross-episode connections in comprehension and memory in six experiments. Experiments 1 and 2 used a priming technique; it was found that verification time for a test sentence from one story was speeded by an immediately preceding test sentence from a thematically similar story but only when subjects were given instructions to rate the similarities of the stories. In the remaining experiments, a single test sentence was presented immediately after a story was read, with timing controlled by presenting the story one word at a time. Response time for a test sentence from a previously read story was facilitated if the immediately preceding story was thematically similar, but only if the previously read story was extensively prestudied. We conclude that, during reading of an episode, thematic information may be encoded so as to lead to activation of similar episodes and formation of connections in memory between episodes, but such encoding is not automatic and depends on subjects' strategies and task difficulty.

Using semantic memory to find vs create a mood.

Ss produced words from semantic memory which satisfied certain constraints. In Experiment I, a noun category plus a number and a letter were presented (e.g., ANIMAL-I-D, FRUIT-P-3), and S produced an instance of the category which had the given letter in the position designated by the given number. Faster responses occurred when the position cue occurred before the letter rather than after it. In Experiments II and III, Ss saw only a number and a letter (e.g., l-D, P-3) and were required to produce any word that had the given letter in the position designated by the given number. Order of the position and letter cues did not influence response times. The effect of order in one case and not the other strongly suggests that producing a word that satisfies certain semantic constraints involves a different process from producing a word that satisfies only certain orthographic restrictions.