ABSTRACT
Perceptions of Within-Group Variability During the past 20 years, much of the research on intergroup perception has focused on group variability; for example, variability in the “intelligence” of physicists or the “kindness” of the elderly. The typical finding is an outgroup homogeneity effect-people perceive their outgroups to be less variable along individual attributes than their ingroups. This is a robust finding across a variety of naturally occurring groups, including profession, nationality, race, religion, age, college major, and sorority-fraternity affiliation (for reviews, see Brewer, 1993; Linville, 1998; Linville & Fischer, 1998; Ostrom & Sedikides, 1992; Park, Judd, & Ryan, 1991; Sedikides & Ostrom, 1993). A reverse ingroup arises in some cases where people identify strongly with their ingroup, especially with respect to attributes that are relevant to group identity (R.Brown & Wootton-Millward, 1993; C.Kelly, 1989; Mullen & Hu, 1989; Simon, 1992a). In addition, perceived group variability has a strong impact on many aspects of stereotyping and intergroup perception (for a review, see Linville & Fischer, 1998). For example, when people perceive a group to be homogeneous, they are more likely to generalize from an individual to the group as a whole (Nisbett, Krantz, Jepson, & Kunda, 1983; Quattrone & Jones, 1980), and from the group stereotype to individual members (Krueger & Rothbart, 1988; Ryan, Judd, & Park, 1996). But they are less likely to generalize counterstereotypic information about an individual to the group as a whole (Park & Hastie, 1987; Ryan et al., 1996), or to classify an atypical individual as a group member (A.J.Lambert, 1995; Park & Hastie, 1987).
