ABSTRACT

The social categorization of people as ingroup and outgroup members has been shown to lead to two robust effects. First, categorization (e.g., according to gender) leads to the perceptual accentuation of similarities within groups (e.g., women perceived as more similar to other women and men to other men) and differences between groups (e.g., women and men perceived as increasingly different from one another; see Doise, 1978; Doise, Deschamps, & Meyer, 1978; Tajfel & Wilkes, 1963). Second, bias and discrimination follow from social categorization when individuals belong to one of the groups (for reviews see Brewer, 1979; Doise, 1978; Messick & Mackie, 1989; Tajfel, 1978; Wilder, 1986). In fact, the mere classification of people into ingroups and outgroups on the basis of trivial distinctions has been shown to result in biased evaluations (e.g., Brewer & Silver, 1978; Doise et al., 1978; Kahn & Ryen, 1972) and the unequal distribution of rewards (e.g., Tajfel, Flament, Billig, & Bundy, 1971; Turner, 1975).