ABSTRACT

The ability to learn about groups and their characteristics is crucial to the way people make sense of their social world. Nevertheless, quite a number of studies have indicated that people can have great trouble learning associations between groups and their attributes and often perceive associations that do not exist. It is generally assumed that these shortcomings or biases are partly responsible for group stereotyping and minority discrimination. Among the most prominent of these group biases are illusory correlation-the perception of a correlation between a group and some characteristics that do not exist (Hamilton & Gifford, 1976; Hamilton & Rose, 1980), accentuationmaking a distinction between groups beyond actual differences (Eiser, 1971;

A recurrent connectionist model of group biases 253 Tajfel & Wilkes, 1963), subtyping-the rejection of stereotype-inconsistent information concentrated in a few group members (Hewstone, 1994), and outgroup homogeneity-the perception of outgroups as more homogeneous and stereotypical than the ingroup (Linville, Fisher, & Salovey, 1989; Messick & Mackie, 1989).