People perceive groups as less unified when those groups contradict their opinions

Evidence

Pilialoha and Brewer (2006) used basic principles of balance theory (Heider, 1958) to predict when decision groups were and were not likely to be perceived as entitative bodies. Participants were presented with a positively valenced decision group (e.g., the student body court, the Supreme Court) and were informed about a ruling that the court had made on an issue about which the participants had already formed a relatively strong opinion. The court ruling either conformed to the participants’ point of view on the matter or contradicted it. After reading about the case and the court’s decision, participants’ perceptions of the entitativity of the decision group were assessed. When the court and the participant had a common view, a balanced state existed. Pilialoha and Brewer postulated that balance can result in increased perceptions of entitativity of the target group. However, when the court and the participants’ view differed, a state of imbalance existed, which, according to balance theory, would motivate the person to change some element to restore balance (Heider, 1958). One way in which this inconsistency could be resolved was through a process Pilialoha and Brewer called de-entification, whereby participants come to see the decision group as particularly low in entitativity. This is, in fact, what Pilialoha and Brewer found. When the court and the participant agreed, the court was seen as higher in entitativity than when the court and the participant disagreed. … Thus, perceptions of a group’s entitativity can be influenced by the perceiver’s motivation to preserve or to restore balance. — Roderick M. Kramer, Geoffrey J. Leonardelli, Robert W. Livingston, Social Cognition, Social Identity, and…, 258

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s prejudice-psychology thread: ‘de-entification’ is a mechanism for delegitimizing an out-group (a disagreeing court) by seeing it as fragmented/unreal — echoes Allport’s analysis of how prejudice rationalizes while preserving balance.
• QUESTION: Does de-entification generalize beyond courts to religious or ethnic out-groups, and could it be the inverse mechanism of the typical ingroup-outgroup homogeneity perception asymmetry?
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Roderick M. Kramer, Geoffrey J. Leonardelli, Robert W. Livingston, Social Cognition, Social Identity, and…, 258