Perceiving individuals and groups: Expectancies, dispositional inferences, and causal attributions.

Abstract

Two experiments investigated differences in forming impressions of individual and group targets.Experiment 1 showed that when forming an impression of an individual, perceivers made more extreme trait judgments, made those judgments more quickly and with greater confidence, and recalled more information than when the impression target was a group.Experiment 2 showed that when participants were forming an impression of an individual, expectancy-inconsistent behaviors spontaneously triggered causal attributions to resolve the inconsistency; this was not the case when the impression target was a group.Results are interpreted as reflecting perceivers' a priori assumptions of unity and coherence in individual versus group targets.Research on how perceivers form impressions of individuals has traditionally been conducted independently from research on how perceivers form conceptions of groups.These separate lines of research may imply that the processes underlying the formation of impressions of individuals and of groups are fundamentally distinct.Moreover, several studies comparing information processing for individual and group targets have shown differences in how information about these targets is processed (see Hamilton & Sherman, 1996, for a review).However, given that impression formation in both cases is based on how people learn, integrate, and use information they acquire about others, the distinction between these areas of research may be more artificial than real.Recently, Hamilton and Sherman (1996) proposed that, although the same mechanisms underlie impression formation in all cases, the degree to which a social target is perceived to be a unified, coherent entity fundamentally affects the way people process information about that target.Moreover, they argued, perceivers expect that individuals are more unified and coherent