How a perceiver construes a group determines which cues mark it as a group.

Evidence

To test these ideas, Rutchick et al. (2008) induced participants to think about groups with either a categorical or dynamic perspective and found that these two views weighted cues to entitativity differently. … Rutchick et al. (2008) found that perceivers in whom a categorical construal had been induced used group similarity as a basis for judging entitativity, whereas those in whom a dynamic construal had been induced used group action and interaction as cues to entitativity. Thus, different cues were predictive of the same target group’s entitativity as a function of which way of construing had been induced. — Roderick M. Kramer, Geoffrey J. Leonardelli, Robert W. Livingston, Social Cognition, Social Identity, and…, 233

Categorization

• SEED: Possible essay angle: a perceiver primed to see an outgroup dynamically (as acting agents) may judge it a more threatening, unified actor than one primed categorically — mechanism connecting entitativity priming to prejudice.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s prior thread on how ingroup/outgroup cognition is cue-driven rather than fixed — parallels Allport’s category-based vs. action-based construals of outgroups.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Roderick M. Kramer, Geoffrey J. Leonardelli, Robert W. Livingston, Social Cognition, Social Identity, and…, 233