Entitativity research has measured perception but not its behavioral effects

Evidence

The research we have reviewed has addressed an impressive array of questions. Yet it is safe to say that nearly all of these studies have focused on the “mental experience” of entitativity in the perceiver. As such, the dependent variables in these studies have been judgments of groups, recall of information, response times to group-relevant stimuli, and other measures familiar to social cognition researchers. All this effort has been very informative. However, we have had very little to say about the effects of perceived entitativity on behavior. Numerous interesting and important questions pertaining to behavioral outcomes need to be investigated. When we perceive groups as being high versus low in entitativity, what differences are there in the behavioral functioning of these groups? How do they differ in organizational structure, leadership, communication patterns, and the regulatory norms and guidelines operating within the group? How do differences in perceived entitativity of a group affect the behavior of individuals, either members of the group itself or outsiders affected by the group? How does the perceived entitativity of groups affect the relations between groups, in either cooperative or adversarial contexts? — Roderick M. Kramer, Geoffrey J. Leonardelli, Robert W. Livingston, Social Cognition, Social Identity, and…, 284

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s broader prejudice-psychology thread: entitativity perception (seeing an outgroup as a cohesive entity) is a known cognitive ingredient of stereotyping, but this flags that its downstream behavioral/intergroup consequences remain untested.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Roderick M. Kramer, Geoffrey J. Leonardelli, Robert W. Livingston, Social Cognition, Social Identity, and…, 284