“They’re all the Same!”...But for Several Different Reasons

People often get confused between members of the same social group because “they all look the same!” In a recent review, Constantina Badea and I looked at the various reasons for this group homogeneity effect.

 
One reason is that group members actually do look the same as one another: Try identifying the culprit in a line-up of the Queen’s Guards!

Another reason is that people, especially Westerners, are motivated to perceive people in their own groups as individuals. This perceived in-group heterogeneity lets you express your individuality and distance yourself from your group's negative aspects.

It also matters what kind of group is being judged. There is a tendency to judge people in small groups, low status groups, and low power groups as being relatively similar to one another.

Finally, it matters what dimensions are being used to judge the groups. Group members tend to be rated as being similar to one another when they are judged on stereotypical dimensions as opposed to nonstereotypical or counterstereotypical dimensions (e.g., men judged on the dimension “adventurous” rather than "sensitive").

So, whether or not “they all look the same” depends on their actual variability, whether you are one of them, how numerous and powerful they are, and what kind of dimensions you’re judging them on.

For further information, please see the following journal article: Rubin, M., & Badea, C. (2012). They're All the Same!. . . but for Several Different Reasons: A Review of the Multicausal Nature of Perceived Group Variability Current Directions in Psychological Science, 21 (6), 367-372 DOI: 10.1177/0963721412457363

A self-archived version of this paper is available here.

Please click here for a collection of research papers investigating perceived group variability.

The Disproportionate Influence of Negative Intergroup Encounters on Prejudice

Back in February, I wrote about some research in which my colleagues and I showed that negative experiences with people from other groups are better at drawing attention to the people's group memberships than positive experiences (Paolini, Harwood, & Rubin, 2010). In other words, if you have a negative encounter with someone from another group, then you are more likely to think about their group memberships (e.g., their gender, race, nationality, etc.) than if you have a positive encounter with them. This increased awareness of a person's group memberships following a negative encounter with them is potentially problematic for the goal of reducing intergroup conflict in society because it means that people are naturally biased towards attributing bad things to out-group members' groups and generalizing their negative experiences with one out-group member to all of the other out-group members. Our preliminary evidence provided some support for this assumption, showing that people were more likely to mention a woman's ethnicity when she behaved negatively rather than positively. However, we did not go as far as testing whether this out-group salience effect led to greater prejudice against the out-group.

Now, Fiona Barlow and colleagues have found this missing piece of the puzzle in a series of research studies published this week (Barlow, Paolini, Pedersen, Hornsey, Radke, Harwood, Rubin, & Sibley, 2012). We looked at prejudice against Black Australians, Muslim Australians, and asylum seekers and found that negative experiences with these people were a stronger and more consistent predictor of negative attitudes towards them than positive experiences were of positive attitudes. For example, negative experiences, but not positive experiences, with Black Americans predicted suspicion about Barack Obama’s birthplace, which represents a subtle measure of racism.
  
These results suggest that negative experiences with out-group members are not only more likely than positive experiences to make people think about out-group members' group memberships, but also to influences people's attitudes towards the out-groups. Taken together, these two recent papers suggest that negative experiences with out-group members have a greater potential than positive experiences to influence people's thoughts and feelings about out-groups. This work implies that we should redouble our efforts to encourage positive experiences between members of different groups because this positive intergroup contact is naturally disadvantaged against improving intergroup relations when compared with the more powerful influence of negative intergroup contact.

For further information, please see the following journal article:  Barlow, F., Paolini, S., Pedersen, A., Hornsey, M., Radke, H., Harwood, J., Rubin, M., & Sibley, C. (2012). The Contact Caveat: Negative Contact Predicts Increased Prejudice More Than Positive Contact Predicts Reduced Prejudice Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 38 (12), 1629-1643 DOI: 10.1177/0146167212457953