The Formation of Negative Attitudes Toward Novel Groups.

People perceive out-groups, minorities, and novel groups more negatively than in-groups, majorities, and familiar groups. Previous research has argued that such intergroup biases may be caused by the order in which people typically encounter social groups. Groups that are relatively novel to perceivers (e.g., out-groups, minorities) are primarily associated with distinct attributes that differentiate them from familiar groups. Because distinct attributes are typically negative, attitudes toward novel groups are negatively biased. Five experiments (N = 2,615 adults) confirmed the generalizability of the novel groups' disadvantage to different aspects of attitude formation (i.e., evaluations, memory, stereotyping), to cases with more than two groups, and to cases in which groups were majority/minority or in-groups/out-groups. Our findings revealed a remarkably robust influence of learning order in the formation of group attitudes, and they imply that people often perceive novel groups more negatively than they actually are.

Differentiation in social perception: Why later-encountered individuals are described more negatively.

According to the cognitive-ecological model of social perception, biases toward individuals can arise as by-products of cognitive principles that interact with the information ecology. The present work tested whether negatively biased person descriptions occur as by-products of cognitive differentiation. Later-encountered persons are described by their distinct attributes that differentiate them from earlier-encountered persons. Because distinct attributes tend to be negative, serial person descriptions should become increasingly negative. We found our predictions confirmed in six studies. In Study 1, descriptions of representatively sampled persons became increasingly distinct and negative with increasing serial positions of the target person. Study 2 eliminated this pattern of results by instructing perceivers to assimilate rather than differentiate a series of targets. Study 3 generalized the pattern from one-word descriptions of still photos of targets to multisentence descriptions of videos of targets. In line with the cognitive-ecological model, Studies 4-5b found that the relation between serial position and negativity was amplified among targets with similar positive attributes, zero among targets with distinct positive or negative attributes, and reversed among similar negative targets. Study 6 returned to representatively sampled targets and generalized the serial position-negativity effect from descriptions of the targets to overall evaluations of them. In sum, the present research provides strong evidence for the explanatory power of the cognitive-ecological model of social perception. We discuss theoretical and practical implications. It may pay off to appear early in an evaluation sequence. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Who shows the Unlikelihood Effect - and why?

Recent work shows that people judge an outcome as less likely when they learn the probabilities of all single pathways that lead to that outcome, a phenomenon termed the Unlikelihood Effect. The initial explanation for this effect is that the low pathway probabilities trigger thoughts that deem the outcome unlikely. We tested the alternative explanation that the effect results from people's erroneous interpretation and processing of the probability information provided in the paradigm. By reanalyzing the original experiments, we discovered that the Unlikelihood Effect had been substantially driven by a small subset of people who give extremely low likelihood judgments. We conducted six preregistered experiments, showing that these people are unaware of the total outcome probability and do formally incorrect calculations with the given probabilities. Controlling for these factors statistically and experimentally reduced the proportion of people giving extremely low likelihood judgments, reducing and sometimes eliminating the Unlikelihood Effect. Our results confirm that the Unlikelihood Effect is overall a robust empirical phenomenon, but suggest that the effect results at least to some degree from a few people's difficulties with encoding, understanding, and integrating probabilities. Our findings align with current research on other psychological effects, showing that empirical effects can be caused by participants engaging in qualitatively different mental processes.