Perceived membership in a stigmatized group expands the opposing group’s effective size

Evidence

I once observed a group of seven military prisoners, handcuffed together in subgroups of two or three, enter an airport terminal, suffering from acute embarrassment and humiliation. Heads were lowered, eyes were averted from others in the setting, faces were pale and strained, despite an obvious attempt to act unconcerned. When their three military guards ordered them to sit, all adjusted their postures so as to blot out any view of the handcuffs from all but the nearest or most attentive observers. While the size of the prisoner group was fairly large, the fact that they were quite obviously prisoners pushed all others in the setting into a group of nonprisoners. The size of the latter group thus greatly exceeded seven. — Lyn H. Lofland, World of Strangers_ Order and Action in…, 821

Categorization

• XREF: Ties to the reader’s Lofland-reading: group boundaries are perceptual categories, not physical counts — strangers coalesce into a hostile ‘group’ only when a marked identity makes everyone else a unified them. — connects to: Perceived academic status biases recalled physical size of a person. — Anthony G. Greenwald and Mahzarin R. Banaji, Implicit Social Cognition: Attitudes,…, 96