Whether a group has an executive unit changes how people explain its mistakes

Evidence

To test this possibility, Teramae and Karasawa (2008) manipulated the existence of a well-functioning “brain” in a group and examined the type of resultant behavior explanations. Japanese undergraduate students read a scenario that described a police department reaching a wrong decision (i.e., arresting an innocent person as a crime suspect). … In the “executive function present” condition, it was described in the scenario that the department established an investigation headquarters so that this executive unit could process relevant information and make important decisions. In the “executive function absent” condition, it was stated that there was no such executive unit. In addition to these “group actor” conditions, there were “individual actor” conditions in which an individual officer, a member of either the department that had an executive function or the one with no such function, made the same mistake (i.e., arresting a wrong person) on his own capacity. — Roderick M. Kramer, Geoffrey J. Leonardelli, Robert W. Livingston, Social Cognition, Social Identity, and…, 148

Categorization

• QUESTION: What were the actual results of Teramae and Karasawa’s study? The passage describes the design but the outcome is in subsequent paragraphs.