We often make generalizations about the behavior of groups
of people. We might say that college students are prone to binge drink or that
older people tend to go to sleep early.
Presumably, if you believe that a group acts in a particular way, then
you should assume that the members of that group are representative of the
group as a whole. If you believe that
40% of college students binge drink, then if you select a college student at
random, you should assume that he or she has a 40% chance of being a binge
drinker.
An interesting paper by Clayton Critcher and David Dunning
in the January, 2013 issue of the Journal
of Personality and Social Psychology suggests that we actually think about
specific members of groups differently than we think about the group as a
whole.
In a series of studies, these researchers demonstrated that
people assume specific group members act more morally and more based on their
individual will than the group as a whole.
In one study, for example, participants were told that
researchers would be taking a poll of college students on a campus about
whether they had engaged in a variety of behaviors. Some of these behaviors had a strong moral
or selfless component (like giving up a seat on a bus for an old person), while
others were immoral or selfish (like not doing one’s share on a group
project). Participants making group
predictions were asked what percentage of college students would respond that
they had engaged in the behavior. People
making individual predictions were asked to think about a randomly selected
student and were asked how likely it was that person engaged in these
behaviors.
For the moral/selfless behaviors, participants thinking
about individuals rated that the person would be more likely to perform the
behavior than those thinking about the group as a whole. For the immoral/selfish behaviors there was
no difference between those rating the individuals and those rating the group.
The researchers replicated this finding several times. In one study, they took out the moral
dimension and focused on individual will.
Some of the behaviors were ones that an individual would have to choose
to do (like travel a long distance to see a favorite band perform), while
others reflected a person acting along with social forces (like voting for the
same political candidate as one’s parents).
Again, participants rated the likelihood of the behavior either for the
individual or the group.
In this case, participants rated individuals as more likely
than the group to perform a behavior when the behavior required individual
will, but not when it reflected other social forces.
It seems that when we reason about individuals, we focus on
elements that make individuals unique like their ability to initiate their own
actions. When we reason about groups, we
focus on more general characteristics that drive many different people’s
behavior.
This finding has interesting implications for our judgments
of people’s guilt. For example, if you
think that individual people should be more moral than groups, then you might
hold an individual highly responsible for his or her actions, even if their
social group as a whole tends to perform the same behavior.
