Is the automatic evaluation of individual group members inherently biased by their group membership?☆

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2023.104491Get rights and content

Abstract

According to some person perception theories, when people perceive an individual member of a social group, the information about the group is activated more spontaneously and easily than information specific to the individual. Therefore, the judgment of individual group members might be more sensitive to group information (relatively to individuating information) the more automatic (fast, unintentional, and effortless) the judgment is. We tested this premise with a minimalistic impression formation paradigm that provided evaluative information about eight individuals and assigned them to two novel groups. In one group, three members behaved positively, and one member behaved negatively. In the other group, three members behaved negatively and one positively. In a meta-analysis of 13 experiments (Ns = 4157 for automatic judgment, 6071 for nonautomatic judgment) that used this paradigm, we found that the evaluation of the atypical group members, on measures developed to tap automatic judgment and on measures of nonautomatic judgment, was sensitive to the individuating information more than to the group information. However, the relative effect of group information (vs. individuating information) was stronger on automatic than on nonautomatic judgment. Our findings suggest that the automatic judgment of individual group members is highly sensitive to individuating information but is still, inherently, more biased than nonautomatic judgment by group information.

Section snippets

Relevant theories

Early theories of person perception (e.g., Brewer, 1988; Fiske & Neuberg, 1990) suggested that when perceivers judge individual members of known groups, they rely on group information, unless the person who makes the judgment is sufficiently motivated and has sufficient attentional resources to individuate the target individual. This hypothesis is based on the premise that perceivers are cognitive misers who seek to simplify the impression formation task under sub-optimal conditions (Fiske &

Relevant evidence

Research on nonautomatic judgment is based on the measurement of judgment with direct self-report questionnaires. Some studies found support for the premise of early theories that group information is the default basis for nonautomatic judgment, and that relying on it is less effortful than relying on individuating information (Chun & Kruglanski, 2006; Kruglanski & Webster, 1991; Macrae, Hewstone, & Griffiths, 1993; Macrae, Milne, & Bodenhausen, 1994). However, a comprehensive literature review

Is there a basic tendency to rely on information about the group in automatic judgment?

In the present research, we sought to extend research on the automatic and nonautomatic judgment of individual group members in a paradigm that provided us full control on the group information and the individuating information. We designed that paradigm to provide a clean comparison between group information and personal characteristics in their effect on judgment. In previous research, all the individual targets belonged to existing social groups that participants have already known

Experiment 1: The basic paradigm

Experiment 1 tested the effects of individuating information and group information on nonautomatic evaluation and automatic evaluation, measured with the IAT.

Additional experiments and a meta-analysis

Table 3 summarizes the details of additional experiments that used the same paradigm as in Experiment 1. All these experiments contributed direct and conceptual replications of Experiment 1 that helped obtain, through a meta-analysis, a more accurate estimation of the effects of individuating information and group information on nonautomatic and automatic evaluation of individual group members. Experiments S1 and S2 tested the robustness of the results to alternative measures of automatic

Experiment 2: Generalization to atypical individuals

Our experiments found that individuating information dominated nonautomatic and automatic evaluation. One possible concern about the validity of our findings is that our paradigm might be insufficient for forming target groups in our participants' mind. Perhaps whom we considered individual group members were perceived by participants as individuals with no connection to a social group. That concern is alleviated by the fact that the evaluation of the individual members was sensitive to group

General discussion

We used an impression formation paradigm to investigate the effect of group information and individuating information on people's directly and indirectly measured evaluations of individual members of novel social groups. Across the two types of measures, data collected in 14 experiments suggested that individuating information had a large influence on participants' evaluations while group information had a much smaller influence. Participants showed a preference for a target individual who

Conclusion

Theory and research suggest that automatic evaluation of individual group members is determined mostly by evaluative information about the individuals' groups, ignoring any unique information known about the evaluated individual. Yet, our research suggests that information about the individual strongly influences automatic evaluation, while the influence of group information is small. Nevertheless, compared with its effect on nonautomatic evaluation, the relative influence of group information

Open practices

The materials, data, and pre-registrations of the experiments are accessible at https://osf.io/zkejc/.

Declaration of Competing Interest

The authors declare no competing interests.

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the Israel Science Foundation [grant number 1684/21], awarded to Y. Bar-Anan. All materials, data, and pre-registrations of experiments are accessible at https://osf.io/zkejc/.

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    This paper has been recommended for acceptance by Nicholas Rule.

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