Perceived entitativity makes outsiders blame whole groups for one member’s transgression

Evidence

Lickel et al. (2003) examined the collective responsibility that participants assigned to groups that were somehow related to the Columbine High School shootings. Specifically, they found that both the killers’ parents and their peer group (the Trenchcoat Mafia) were held as collectively responsible for the incident, and the extent of this judged responsibility was correlated with the perceived entitativity of those groups. Lickel et al. also explored the possible thought processes that mediated the relationship between perceptions of a group’s entitativity and collective responsibility. They found evidence for two such thought processes. First, an “inference of commission” occurred when participants assumed that other group members somehow encouraged or sympathized with the transgression. Second, an “inference of omission” occurred when participants assumed that other group members neglected to act in a way that could have prevented the transgression. Both these lines of thinking resulted in participants assigning more collective responsibility to entitative groups that were indirectly related to the Columbine High School shootings. — Roderick M. Kramer, Geoffrey J. Leonardelli, Robert W. Livingston, Social Cognition, Social Identity, and…, 270

Categorization

• XREF: This is a mechanism-level account of group blame — readers’ parents and peer group blamed for the killers, mediated by entitativity. Connects directly to prior Allport reassessment and Islamophobia/antisemitism cognition threads where a whole category is indicted for one member’s act; also ties to scapegoating patterns traced in anti-Semitism studies. — connects to: Collective blame toward groups tracks perceived interdependence with wrongdoers, via commission and omission inferences. — Nyla R. Branscombe and Bertjan Doosje (eds.), Collective Guilt: International…, 356
• SEED: The commission/omission inference distinction is a usable analytical frame for an essay on why a single terrorist attack transfers guilt to ‘the parents,’ ‘the community,’ ‘the religion’ — whom observers selectively infer as complicit vs. negligent based on how entitative the group looks.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Roderick M. Kramer, Geoffrey J. Leonardelli, Robert W. Livingston, Social Cognition, Social Identity, and…, 270