A Group By Any Other Name—The Role of Entitativity in Group Perception

2002/01/01 by David L. Hamilton, Steven J. Sherman, Luigi Castelli · 1 citation
Social Sciences · Psychology · #Social and Intergroup Psychology #Cultural Differences and Values #Evolutionary Psychology and Human Behavior #Psychology #Social psychology #Perception #Variety (cybernetics) #Social group

paper · doi:10.1080/14792772143000049

openalex publication_date 2002/01/01 · openalex created_date 2016/06/24 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/29

Abstract

The social world consists of numerous and diverse groupings of people into meaningful and important collectives. As perceivers, we routinely encounter aggregates of people, some of which we endow with the property of groupness, and others we do not. Moreover, the variety of groups is enormous, yet perceivers differentiate among them and understand their properties. This chapter discusses how and why perceivers “see” an aggregate of persons as a group, the distinctions among different types of groups that perceivers detect, the variation among groups in their perceived groupness or entitativity, and the consequences that follow from perceiving a group as an entitative unit. The results of our research program addressing these issues are summarized, and implications for remaining unanswered questions are discussed.

Citations

• The Social Identity Theory of Intergroup Behavior
• Self-efficacy mechanism in human agency.
• Common fate, similarity, and other indices of the status of aggregates of persons as social entities
• Motivation reconsidered: The concept of competence.
• Perceiving individuals and groups: Expectancies, dispositional inferences, and causal attributions.
• Varieties of groups and the perception of group entitativity.

Cited by

• Collective responsibility [wikipedia]