Perceived group agency drives opposite evaluations of in-groups and out-groups

Evidence

Some studies report a negative association between perceptions of out-group entitativity and evaluations of that out-group, whereas others have found a positive association between perceptions of in-group entitativity and in-group evaluations (Brewer & Harasty, 1996; Castano, Yzerbyt, et al., 2003). This difference may be due in part to the fact that one of the group characteristics that entitativity implies is group agency (Spencer-Rodgers, Hamilton, et al., 2007). If an out-group is highly agentic, outside perceivers may assume that the group’s agency may pose a threat and could be used against their own group, which consequently would generate negative evaluations of entitative out-groups. On the other hand, if an in-group is highly agentic, its members would assume that the group’s agency will be used to their advantage, which would lead in-group members to positively evaluate entitative in-groups. — Roderick M. Kramer, Geoffrey J. Leonardelli, Robert W. Livingston, Social Cognition, Social Identity, and…, 250

Categorization

• XREF: Connects directly to the reader’s prejudice-psychology thread with Allport: perceived entitativity/agency as an ingroup-outgroup mechanism that helps explain when outgroups get demonized as threatening conglomerations, echoing how such perceptions underwire Islamophobia/antisemitism.
• ADDENDUM: Mechanism-level corroboration for ‘Complaints About Immodesty Go Way Back’ frame that group signaling reads differently by group membership — here generalized to entitativity itself.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Roderick M. Kramer, Geoffrey J. Leonardelli, Robert W. Livingston, Social Cognition, Social Identity, and…, 250