Ordinary people readily attribute intentions and desires to groups

Evidence

The notion that a group may have a mental state has long been rejected in social psychology as a nonscientific fallacy (Allport, 1924). … However, the findings by Teramae and Karasawa (2008) demonstrate that behavior explanations constructed by ordinary people can easily presuppose intentions associated with beliefs and desires even in a group, as long as the group is perceived to possess a mind-like function. — Roderick M. Kramer, Geoffrey J. Leonardelli, Robert W. Livingston, Social Cognition, Social Identity, and…, 154

Categorization

• XREF: Floyd Allport’s 1924 rejection of group mind — same Allport family the reader is reassessing in the prejudice work. The cultural lineage here is striking.
• DEEPTHINKING: The central tension — collective intentionality was banished as a fallacy but psychological data show laypeople spontaneously deploy it — bears on how groups (nations, religious communities) get held morally responsible, which is the reader’s core outgroup-mechanism question.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Roderick M. Kramer, Geoffrey J. Leonardelli, Robert W. Livingston, Social Cognition, Social Identity, and…, 154