ABSTRACT
Not all groups are equally informative about their members, nor are all groups equally informative in parsing social situations. Individuals belong to multiple aggregations, each of which has different (and frequently competing) relevance depending on environmental conditions. At any given moment what an individual does may be contingent on the person being a friend, a colleague, or a token of an ethnic or gender type. Which of these underlies their behaviour requires considerable interpretive skills (as anyone who has participated in a faculty meeting knows). One way to manage this problem is to reduce the relative contribution that membership in different groups makes in interpreting an individual's behaviour. For instance, in a particular situation, an individual's behaviour might be interpretable as a function of that individual's membership in two different groups (say, race or occupation). If membership in one of these groups is reliably more important in governing behaviour, cognitive demand is reduced (since one membership can essentially be discounted as a causal factor underlying behaviour). Thus, for most Americans, race is unfortunately thought to be more crucial than occupation, as most minorities who have applied for a mortgage can attest.
