Group markers, such as the group's name, banner, or other symbols that are associated with a group oftentimes arbitrarily relate to group characteristics, and hence, they do not provide much information about the attributes of the group or its members. However, here we show that when reasoning about novel social groups people sometimes use such markers as cues to the characteristics of the groups that they are associated with, even in cases in which they know these markers were chosen arbitrarily. Across three studies (collected online; total N = 485) we show that: 1) people are more likely to think two novel social groups which have similar group markers (i.e., group names [Study 1] and identifying group colors [Study 2]) are more similar to each other than two groups which have more distinct markers, and 2) people not only take such markers as cues to group similarity, but they also expect others to intentionally pick group markers in ways that signal group distinctiveness (Study 3). Overall, these studies suggest that even though the effects of group markers are often dismissed in the intergroup cognition literature, they can affect how people perceive different groups in subtle ways.

团体标记，例如团体名称、旗帜或与团体相关联的其他符号，通常与团体特征相关，因此，它们不提供关于团体或其成员的属性的太多信息。然而，我们在这里表明，在推理新的社会群体时，人们有时会使用此类标记作为与他们相关的群体特征的线索，即使在他们知道这些标记是任意选择的情况下也是如此。三项研究（在线收集；总N = 485）我们表明：1）人们更有可能认为具有相似群体标记（即群体名称 [研究 1] 和识别群体颜色 [研究 2]）的两个新社会群体比两个群体更相似具有更多不同标记的群体，以及 2) 人们不仅将这些标记作为群体相似性的线索，而且他们还期望其他人以表明群体独特性的方式有意选择群体标记（研究 3）。总的来说，这些研究表明，尽管群体标记的影响在群体间认知文献中经常被忽视，但它们可以以微妙的方式影响人们对不同群体的看法。