PsychologicalDUAL-USE

Outgroup Homogeneity

What it is

Members of groups one does not belong to are perceived as more alike — in opinions, traits and appearance — than members of one's own group, so a single outgroup member is readily taken as typical of all of them.

How it works

Quattrone and Jones showed in 1980 that students at Princeton and Rutgers each expected the other campus to be more uniform than their own, and Park and Rothbart found in 1982 that people remembered individuating details about ingroup members but only category-level information about outgroup members. Mullen and Hu's 1989 meta-analysis confirmed a modest, reliable effect. The main mechanism is the structure of familiarity: ingroup members are encountered as individuals across many situations, while outgroup members are met rarely, in narrow roles, and are stored as a type. The effect is not universal; Simon and Brown found that minority groups in a majority context sometimes see their own group as the more homogeneous one, and the cross-race deficit in face recognition, meta-analysed by Meissner and Brigham, is its perceptual cousin. For persuasion the payoff is efficiency. An audience that already believes “they are all alike” will accept one extreme member, one quotation, or one incident as the whole group, which is the working assumption behind nutpicking, enemy images and every “this is what they think of you” advertisement.

Real-world examples

  • •Quattrone and Jones (1980) found Princeton students predicted that a Rutgers student's choice would be shared by most Rutgers students, and vice versa, while allowing their own campus more variety.
  • •Campaign material across the spectrum presents the other side's fringe as its centre: images of a small protest are captioned as the movement, and a single outrageous quotation from one activist or one legislator is offered as what “they” believe.
  • •A large share of the eyewitness misidentifications in the Innocence Project's exoneration cases are cross-racial, consistent with the finding that faces from another group are encoded less distinctively.
  • •Foreign publics are routinely described as a single mind (“the Chinese think,” “Americans want”), a habit that makes propaganda about an enemy population easier to accept than the same claim would be about one's own.

Ethical guidelines

Where the line is

Summarising a group by its measured central tendency, with the variation reported and the sampling explained, is legitimate description; presenting a selected extreme member as typical, or speaking of a population as a single mind so that the audience's existing sense of sameness does the work, is manipulation.

  • ●When describing a group you do not belong to, report the range of views within it, and the share holding each, rather than the most vivid member.
  • ●Apply the same individuating standard to the other side that you expect for your own: if you would object to being represented by your movement's fringe, do not represent theirs that way.
  • ●Do not select an extreme outgroup member for display because the audience will generalise; that is exploiting the bias, not reporting.

How to defend against it

  • ►When told what “they” believe, name three members of that group you know disagree with each other; if you cannot, you do not know the group well enough to accept the generalisation.
  • ►Ask for the distribution: what proportion holds this view, according to what survey, and how was the example chosen?
  • ►Seek direct, sustained contact with members of groups you know only through media; Pettigrew and Tropp's meta-analysis found contact reliably reduces prejudice, and it also restores the variety the bias erases.
  • ►Treat any single quotation, clip or incident presented as representative of a group as a sample of one, and read laterally for the group's own range of responses to it.

From the Defense Playbook

Steelman Before Refutingminutes

Restate the other side's position in its strongest form, to their satisfaction, before you answer it, so that you respond to the actual argument rather than to the caricature a persuader or your own side handed you.

Every playbook entry states how strong its evidence is and when not to use it. Browse the full playbook.

References

  1. Park, B., & Rothbart, M. (1982). Perception of out-group homogeneity and levels of social categorization: Memory for the subordinate attributes of in-group and out-group members. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 42(6), 1051-1068
    Ingroup members remembered with individuating detail, outgroup members at the category level.
  2. Quattrone, G. A., & Jones, E. E. (1980). The perception of variability within in-groups and out-groups: Implications for the law of small numbers. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 38(1), 141-152
    The Princeton and Rutgers studies: each campus expected the other to be more uniform.
  3. Mullen, B., & Hu, L. (1989). Perceptions of ingroup and outgroup variability: A meta-analytic integration. Basic and Applied Social Psychology, 10(3), 233-252
    Meta-analytic confirmation of a modest, reliable outgroup homogeneity effect.
  4. Simon, B., & Brown, R. (1987). Perceived intragroup homogeneity in minority-majority contexts. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 53(4), 703-711
    The reversal: minority groups sometimes perceive their own group as more homogeneous than the majority.
  5. Meissner, C. A., & Brigham, J. C. (2001). Thirty years of investigating the own-race bias in memory for faces: A meta-analytic review. Psychology, Public Policy, and Law, 7(1), 3-35
    The cross-race effect in face recognition, the perceptual counterpart of outgroup homogeneity.
  6. Pettigrew, T. F., & Tropp, L. R. (2006). A meta-analytic test of intergroup contact theory. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 90(5), 751-783
    Intergroup contact reliably reduces prejudice, the basis for the contact defense.
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