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SOCIAL COGNITION. Contents. Social Inference. The Naïve Scientist. Attribution theory. Making Attributions. Attributional Biases. The Cognitive Miser.
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SSoocciiaall IInnffeerreennccee The Naïve Scientist Attribution theory Making Attributions Attributional Biases The Cognitive Miser Heuristics The Motivated Tactician
SSoocciiaall CCaatteeggoorriizzaattiioonn Basic Principles Why Do We Categorize? When Do We Categorize? Consequences of Categorization Dual Process Theories
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SSoocciiaall CCooggnniittiioonn
This chapter is about how people think about other people. Social cognition is a broad term that describes a focus on the way perceivers encode, process, remember, and use information in social contexts in order to make sense of other people’s behavior (where a social context is defined as any real or imagined scenario including reference to self or others). We have placed this chapter on social cognition near the start of the book because it is central to many of the other chapters later on. The way that we organize and use social information is an essential element in our understanding of intergroup and interpersonal processes, social iden- tity and prejudice, attitudes and conformity. Below we will examine the strategies and the shortcomings of social inference, the way in which we categorize others and use cognitive “shortcuts” to clarify and understand all of the information that constantly bombards our senses. We will see how an understanding of social thought has evolved from seeing people as only cold, logical and rational information processors, to a recognition that we are often inclined to go on “gut feeling” and “intuition” when making judgments about others.
Let us begin with common sense. Humans are rationale creatures; we are able to solve com- plex mathematical problems, use sophisticated logic to construct arguments, and we are cogent, balanced, and analytical. It should therefore follow that we apply these principles to everyday social thought and action. This was the view of social cognition that characterized early theorizing. This highly influential view was presented by Heider (1958), who argued that people are motivated by two primary needs: 1) the need to form a coherent view of the world and 2) the need to gain control over the environment. Heider believed that this desire for consistency and stability, the ability to predict and control, makes us behave like naive scientists , rationally and logically testing our hypotheses about the behavior of others. In par- ticular, this need to attribute causes to effects (for example, observed behaviors and events) and to create a meaningful, stable world where things make sense was the basis for a theo- retical approach that became highly influential in how social psychologists viewed social cognition. This set of ideas and models can be referred to as attribution theory.
Heider (1958) believed that we have a basic need to attribute causality because this ascribes meaning to our world, making it clear, definable, and predictable, thereby reducing uncertainty. This need, Heider argued, is a major driving force in human social inference. A clever
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having a bad day – maybe he has just had an argument with his partner (a situational attri- bution). Similarly, imagine your college professor is in a particularly good mood in class one day – singing, joking – behavior that is definitely different from the norm. Do you think her personality might have suddenly changed (a dispositional attribution), or would you infer some other cause (perhaps she has just got a paper accepted to a leading journal), a situa- tional cause. We will discuss how people arrive at either of these different types of attribu- tion later on, but for now it is just important to note that there are fundamentally two different ways that behavior can be explained: by internal or by external causes. As well as this fundamental distinction between internal and external attributions, it is possible to further sub-divide types of inference along two other independent dimensions: stability and controllability (Weiner, 1982; 1986). Stability refers to the extent to which causes are relatively stable and permanent (e.g. natural ability) versus temporary and fluctuating (e.g. being drunk). Controllability refers to the extent to which causes can be influenced by others (e.g. effort) versus the extent to which they are random (e.g. luck). Together, these three dimensions appear to be the typical ways in which people explain events (Meyer & Koebl, 1982) in both individualist and collectivist countries (Hau & Salili, 1991). However, for our purposes, we only need to focus on the most common and clearest distinction: internal versus external causes. How people arrive at either an internal or external attribution is the focus of the next section.
In the previous section we classified the types of attribution people can make, the conclusions that we can arrive at when trying to explain someone else’s behavior. But how do people reach that conclusion, what are the thought processes involved? This is what social cognition is all about. In this section we discuss the two main models of attribution process that emerged from research in the 1970’s: Correspondent Inference Theory and the Co-variation Model.
According to Jones and Davis (1965), when making social inferences people try to make a correspondent inference. In other words, they tend to infer that the action of an actor corresponds to, or is indicative of, a stable personality characteristic. The idea is that people prefer internal, dispositional attributions over external, situation attributions because the former type of knowledge is more valuable with regard to making predictions about behavior. A dispositional attribution such as “rude” is a judgment that the person in question has a particular set of personality attributes, which are assumed to be stable and do not change over time. In contrast a situation attribution – such as explaining behavior as being down to a transitory mood – is by definition a variable and changeable cause. The former, being stable and unchanging, is a much more valuable conclusion (if valid) for pre- dicting future behavior. For example, attributing a shop assistant’s rudeness to an internal cause – his grumpy personality – is useful because we can then assume he will always be
grumpy when we visit the shop, and so we should avoid his till. If we can find dispositional causes for behavior these help us to fulfil what Heider (1958) argued is our basic drive towards coherence and clarity, stability and a predictable world. According to Jones and Davis (1965) we assess whether there is a correspondence bet- ween behavior and personality (i.e. arrive at a correspondent inference or, in other words, a dispositional attribution) by processing three key types of information: social desirabil- ity, choice , and non-common effects. Social desirability information refers to whether the behavior observed is consistent with, or counter to, social norms. An internal, dispositional attribution is more likely when socially undesirable behaviors are observed. People have a tendency to go along with social norms – to adhere to the majority viewpoint – because they wish to avoid exclusion and ridicule for standing out and being different from the crowd (we discuss this normative social influence in detail in Chapter 5). As such, behavior that is socially desirable does not tell us much about people’s personalities because they may simply be going along with the group norm, which may or may not coincide with their own personal point of view. In contrast, someone who exhibits socially undesirable behavior – who goes against the social norm – is much more likely to be displaying behavior that corresponds to an underlying personality trait, because the behavior cannot be attributed to the person simply conforming to the majority. According to Jones and Davis, another type of information that social perceivers seek in order to make a correspondent inference is whether the behavior in question was freely chosen or not. An internal, dispositional attribution is more likely when the person being observed has freely chosen the given behavior. Again, this makes a lot of sense; if behav- ior has been freely chosen then it is much more likely to be the result of an underlying per- sonality characteristic or attitude, rather than a result of coercion, threat, or inducements. When a behavior has a unique consequence, rather than having a range of possible other consequences, we can refer to it as having non-common effects. An internal, dispositional attribution is more likely when the outcome of a behavior has a unique (or non-common) effect. For instance, a punch has really only one possible outcome so it is more likely to be attributed to an internal, dispositional cause. Although there is some evidence to support the idea that people use these three types of information outlined above to attribute causality to others’ behavior (e.g. Jones & Harris, 1967), ultimately the theory has declined in popularity due to some clear limitations. In particular, the model is limited to single instances of behavior and focuses on internal attributions. The latter point is especially important. It is very easy to think of the many times that we have put some- one’s behavior down to bad luck, or them having a bad day. People clearly and consistently make external attributions as well as internal. The model we turn to next directly addresses these limitations and is arguably the most influential of the attribution theories.
Kelley’s (1967) co-variation model accounts for multiple behaviors. Importantly, it also details the processes that result in external as well as internal attributions. According to Kelley, causality is attributed using the co-variation principle. This principle states that for something to be the cause of a particular behavior it must be present when the
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Independently, the presence or absence of each of these types of information has impli- cations for whether a dispositional or situational attribution will be more likely. The presence of consensus information (if everyone else is behaving in the same way as the target person) implies a situational cause, whereas the absence of consensus information implies a dispositional cause. The presence of consistency information (the target person behaves in the same way over and over again) implies a dispositional cause, while the absence of consistency information implies a situational cause. The presence of distinctiveness infor- mation (the target person acts in the same way in many different contexts) implies a disposi- tional cause, but the absence of distinctiveness information implies a situational cause. Here’s an example to illustrate. Imagine you are sitting in class one day and your profes- sor walks in wearing an unusual and particularly garish multi-colored sweater, sporting on its front a picture of a large happy badger. As naïve scientists we like to have a stable and predictable world, so you would be compelled to try to figure out why your professor has chosen to wear such a strange garment. According to the co-variation model, you would assess whether the three types of information outlined above are present or absent. First: consensus. Is everyone wearing the same type of sweater or is it only your pro- fessor? If it is only your professor you’re likely to begin to make an internal, dispositional attribution: no-one else is behaving in the same way (i.e. wearing a strange sweater), so the cause of this strange behavior is likely to be something uniquely to do with your profes- sor, and not the situation (otherwise other people would also be affected by whatever the cause might be – such as a new fashion – and would also be wearing a dodgy sweater). Second: consistency. Is this the first time your professor has worn this sweater, or does he do it every week? If he wears this weird sweater every week, then you’re going to be even more inclined to make a dispositional attribution. If he is only wearing it this week then you might think he’s having only a temporary fashion crisis – perhaps his washing machine has broken (a situational attribution) and the peculiar sweater is the only one he has left that is clean. Third: distinctiveness. Does your professor wear this sweater in different classes? Do you see him around campus sporting similarly ill-advised sweaters? If you do, again you’re going to be more inclined to make a dispositional attribution (i.e. your professor has chronic fashion problems, or perhaps an enduring badger fixation). This is because the behavior is not distinctive to the current situation (which would make it likely that it is something in the immediate context that is making your professor wear the sweater). In sum, if your professor wears bad badger sweaters consistently over time and in dif- ferent contexts, and he is the only person to be doing so, then you’re going to make a dis- positional attribution and conclude that he has terrible fashion sense (or a badger fixation). But anyway, enough of the authors’ fashion dilemmas, back to attribution theory … It is important to note that the pattern of presence or absence across the three types of information is not always as clear-cut as in the above illustration. The way the infor- mation is combined is not simply additive, but depends on an interaction of the different elements. The important point here is that people really are acting like naïve scientists if they attribute causality in this way: seeking out and assessing these three types of infor- mation, then weighing them all up to conclude either an internal or external attribution. There is evidence that, when given all the relevant information, and the time within which to make a judgment, people can make attributional decisions in the way outlined by
Kelley’s co-variation model (Kassin, 1979; McArthur, 1972). However, the model appears to be far from being universally applicable. For instance, while people do use all three types of information, they are not equally attended to (Chen, Yates, & McGinnies, 1988); people pay more attention to the target person information (consistency and distinctiveness information) than to information relating to the other people in the context (consensus information; Windschild & Wells, 1997). Perhaps more importantly, although people follow these rules and deduce causality logically in some circumstances, these appear to only be circumstances where all the information is laid out for participants to clearly see and when participants have the time to work out a likely cause in the complex way described above. However, when some information is missing (e.g. there is no distinctive- ness information available), people can still make attributions. This implies that there are alternative ways in which people can make these sorts of judgments.
So far in this chapter we have seen how people can act like naïve scientists. We like a stable and predictable world, and explaining other people’s behavior as being down to internal, dispositional causes or external, situational causes is one way of achieving this. The correspondent inference model proposes that people try to infer a dispositional cause for behavior because such attributions are most valuable for making predictions. Three types of information are relevant here: whether the behavior in question is socially desirable , chosen or non-chosen , and has a unique effect. However, this model is limited in focusing only on dispositional attributions. The co-variation model is more flexible, able to account for both internal and external attributions. According to Kelley’s co-variation model , people combine consensus , consistency and distinctiveness information to arrive at an internal or external attribution.
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FFiigguurree 22..3 3 Memory Map
Correspondent inference theory
Social desirability
Non-common effects ATTRIBUTION THEORY
Choice
Consensus Consensus
Consensus The co-variationmodel
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The reason why the fundamental attribution error occurs appears to be perceptual salience. The person being observed is the most perceptually salient aspect of the situation (i.e. moving, talking, etc.) and so an internal (person) attribution becomes much more accessible (Taylor & Fiske, 1975). What is important to note here is that something much simpler (i.e. what appears to capture attention the most) determines the social judgment, not a complex naïve scientist-like thought process. The idea that people use simple rules of thumb such as perceptual salience to arrive at social judgments is reinforced by the observation of another attribution bias, the actor-observer bias.
Let’s go back to our irritable shop assistant. In this scenario, in line with the fundamental attribution error, we would be likely to conclude a dispositional attribution, and decide that the shop assistant was simply not a nice person. But imagine a time before when you have been rude to someone. On this basis do you consider yourself a rude and unpleasant person? Probably not. You probably consider yourself to be a nice person who was rude because of a specific (external) – and justifiable – reason, for example stress from work pressures. This tendency to attribute other people’s behavior to internal causes and our own behaviors to external causes is called the actor-observer effect (Jones & Nisbett, 1972).
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FFiigguurree 22..4 4 The fundamental attribution error. Data from Jones and Harris (1967)
Storms (1973) carried out an experiment that neatly illustrated this bias. In an apparent “conversation task” two participants were allocated to observer roles and two as actors who would simply have a five-minute conversation with each other. In a subsequent phase participants were required to attribute causality (that is, judge whether the opinions expressed reflected the speakers’ stable personality or some other contextual determinant). Storms found that observers emphasized dispositional factors when explaining the actors’ behaviors, while actors emphasized situational factors when explaining their own behavior. The explanation for this is again perceptual salience. The actors’ attention was directed away from themselves; they were looking at the situation. Correspondingly, this made a situation attribution more salient or accessible to them. Observers’ attention was focused on the actor, making an explanation focused on the actor – an internal, dispositional attri- bution – more salient or accessible. Further support for the idea that it was simply percep- tual salience that was driving these effects comes from the observation that the actor-observer bias was reversed when the actors were shown videotapes of their opposite perspective before making attributions. When the actors saw their own faces during the task, their attention shifted to be focused on themselves and not the situation, which led to them making an internal attribution.
As well as cognitive-perceptual processes providing an inferential shortcut in attribution judgments, motivations can also bias attributions. Imagine you do well in your social psy- chology exam. Are you likely to attribute your success to luck, a fluke, or are you likely to feel quite proud, and attribute your success to the effort you put in? According to the self- serving attribution bias it’s the latter. Olson and Ross (1988) argue that we are more likely to make internal attributions for our successes (e.g., “I’m intelligent”) and external attri- butions for failures (e.g. “it was a particularly hard exam”) because making attributions in this way protects and maintains our self-esteem. Internally attributing success and exter- nally attributing failure both boosts our feelings of self-worth and protects us from feeling bad when we don’t do well. This type of bias can also work at a group level; we tend to attribute our group’s successes to internal factors and other group’s successes to external factors (Hewstone, 1990). Such group-serving attributions help to bolster the positive view we hold of the groups we belong to (relative to other groups), and therefore help us to feel good by association. In Chapter 6 we’ll see how such own-group bias can contribute to prejudice and discrimination between groups.
People have a basic desire to make sense of the world, to understand it and to be able to predict what will happen. In order to satisfy this desire people make attributions – they try to work out cause and effect, they operate like naïve scientists. People can be rationale and logical in making social inferences. They can look for information relating to con- sensus, consistency and distinctiveness , they can combine these sources of information
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we do this and illustrate how people can be remarkably adept at making reasonably accurate inferences without having to engage in a great deal of cognitive processing.
People save time and effort in making judgments by using heuristics (Tversky & Kahneman, 1974). Heuristics are timesaving mental shortcuts that reduce complex judgments to simple rules of thumb. They are quick and easy, but can result in biased information processing (Ajzen, 1996), which is one of the ways of identifying that they have been used instead of more time-consuming, but more accurate, strategies. Below we outline two of the most com- monly used types of heuristics: representativeness and availability.
The representativeness heuristic is the tendency to allocate a set of attributes to someone if they match the prototype of a given category (Kahneman & Tversky, 1973). It is a quick- and-easy way of putting people in to categories. For instance, if you arrive at a hospital in need of help, you’ll look for the person wearing a white coat and stethoscope, because these specific attributes indicate that the person is (representative of) a doctor. Similarly, when you enter your lecture class you might very quickly identify your professor as being the one with the dubious fashion sense and slightly unkempt looking hair. Later on we will talk at greater length about the use of representativeness information in the context of social categorization , but for now it is important to note one important drawback of using this mental shortcut. While assessing representativeness to a category prototype may often be a good way of making inferences about someone, like any heuristic it is prone to error. In par- ticular, there is the base rate fallacy , which is the tendency to ignore statistical information (base rates) in favor of representativeness information. For example, even if you told some- one that gender is uncorrelated with managerial and administrative roles in some corpora- tion (i.e. that there are an equal number of men and women at different levels of power), they would probably still be more likely to attribute more of the managerial (high power) roles to men than women, because such roles are more representative of men than women.
The availability heuristic is the tendency to judge the frequency or probability of an event in terms of how easy it is to think of examples of that event (Tversky & Kahneman, 1973). It is related to the concept of accessibility , which is the extent to which a concept is readily brought to mind (see Chapter 3 on attitudes). The difference is that availability can refer to one’s subjective experience of accessibility – the awareness that something is accessible – whereas accessibility is typically regarded as an objective measure of how quickly some- thing can be brought to mind, without explicit awareness being a necessary component. The availability heuristic can be illustrated with varied examples from everyday life. For instance, you might feel more trepidation about taking a flight if you have just heard about
a horrific plane crash. In this example, your assessment of how likely it is that the plane journey will be a safe one will be influenced by the availability of information to the contrary. A neat experiment illustrates this heuristic. Schwarz and colleagues (1991) asked participants to recall 12 or six examples of when they had been either assertive or unassertive. After having completed this task participants were then asked to rate their own assertiveness. Counter to what one might logically expect, participants who recalled six examples of their own assertive behavior subsequently rated themselves as more assertive than people who had recalled 12 examples of their own assertive behavior. The same effect occurred for people who recalled examples of unassertive behavior: those who recalled six examples of unassertive behavior rated themselves less assertive (more unassertive) than those who recalled 12 examples of unassertive behavior, see Figure 2.6. These findings are really quite different from what one might expect. Surely someone who can recall more examples of assertive behavior should regard themselves as more assertive than someone who can only recall a few examples. Similarly, someone who can recall more examples of when they have been unassertive should logically then rate them- selves as more unassertive. In contrast, the more examples of assertive or unassertive behavior people were asked to generate, the less assertive or unassertive respectively they perceived themselves to be. The explanation for this effect lies with the availability heuristic. The key is in thinking about how easy or difficult the task might be to people. On average people don’t normally
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FFiigguurree 22..6 6 Evidence for the availability heuristic. Data from Schwartz et al. (1991)
participants he asked whether they thought there was a greater than 1 per cent chance of a nuclear war occurring soon, and for the other half he asked whether they thought there was a less than a 90 per cent chance of a nuclear war occurring soon. Both questions asked for a quantitative estimate of probability, so one imagines how the question asked should not have an impact on the judgments made. In fact, there is quite a considerable effect of the anchor provided in the question. Participants who received the 1 per cent question anchor estimated a 10 per cent chance of a nuclear war occurring, while those who received the 90 per cent anchor estimated a 25 per cent chance of a nuclear war occurring. A similar effect was observed by Greenberg et al. (1986), who found in a mock jury study that participants asked to consider first a harsh verdict were subsequently harsher in their final decision than participants asked first to consider a lenient verdict. In sum, it appears that our judgments on a range of issues are significantly influenced by the point at which we start our deliberations. While the anchoring heuristic has often been considered to be distinct from the availability heuristic, in essence it comes down to the same psychological mechanism. The starting point or anchor exerts an impact on judg- ment because it is the most available source of information relevant to the issue at hand. Either way, this bias has some clearly important implications for a range of social contexts from the way in which lawyers structure questions in the courtroom (to elicit particular answers), to the way that opinion pollsters gauge attitudes.
In this section we have seen how heuristics are sometimes used in social judgment over and above more rational, logical, but time-consuming ways of thinking. In other words, people can sometime be cognitive misers rather than naïve scientists , preferring ease and speed over accuracy. As we noted above in our discussion of attribution theory, participants can and do use the complex systems outlined by models proposed by Jones and Davis (1965) and Kelley (1967), but this only appears to be the case under certain conditions. Other times people seem to revert to making quick and easy judgments using mental shortcuts like availability or representativeness, or relying on simple cues like perceptual salience (which can also be considered a type of availability). These heuristic shortcuts are much less accurate than using more rational, logical modes of thought, but they do approximate a response that is often within acceptable parameters. So what determines whether people will adopt one of these strategies over the other? When are people naïve scientists and when are they cogni- tive misers? According to Kruglanski (1996) people are flexible social thinkers who choose between multiple cognitive strategies (i.e. speed/ease vs. accuracy/logic) based on their current goals, motives, and needs. Kruglanski argued that people are neither exclusively cognitive misers nor naïve scientists, but in fact motivated tacticians. Put another way, people are strategic in their allocation of cognitive resources and as such can decide to be a cognitive miser or a naïve scientist depending on a number of factors. Macrae, Hewstone, and Griffiths (1993)
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HIGHER ACCURACY LOWER ACCURACY
Perceiver acts like a naïve scientist: rational and logical analysis of available information.
Perceiver must make a social inference
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FFiigguurree 22..7 7 The motivated-tactician: conditions of heuristic versus systematic processing
outline a number of factors that determine whether people will adopt logical, rationale, and time-consuming processing strategies in social inference, or whether they will go for a quick and easy, but quite possibly adequate, solution (see Figure 2.7). First, people will be more likely to be a cognitive miser when they are short of time , than when they have plenty of it. This makes sense. Heuristics are quick and easy, they save time, therefore, when we have to make a quick decision. So although it is less accu- rate, heuristics may be the best option open to use in order to make a judgment that at least approximates an adequate response. Second is cognitive load. Heuristics do not require much thought – they can be made off the cuff, simply made from a “gut instinct” or intu- ition (or, what we would now call, availability). In contrast, the naïve scientist approach requires a lot of thought, analysis, and contemplation. If we are busy with lots on our mind, we’re unlikely to devote much time to social perception, and are much more likely to use
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FFiigguurree 22..8 8 Memory Map
Systematic versus heuristic processing
Representativeness
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Anchoring
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The cognitive miser
SOCIAL HEURISTICS COGNITION
Availability
Before considering some of the characteristics of social categorization as a heuristic, let us first define exactly what categorization is. Categorization is “the process of under- standing what something is by knowing what other things it is equivalent to, and what other things it is different from” (McGarty, 1999: 1). This definition captures the key qualities of categorization that will be important in this chapter and others in the book. Categorization is a way of classifying some collection of objects, events, opinions, attitudes, concepts or people. It is a way of labelling some group of things as being all related to each other in some way, all linked and interconnected to a greater or lesser extent (e.g. “dogs”, “furniture”, “weather”, “women”, “World War 2”, “vegetables”, “manchester united”), and a way of comparing one thing to another (e.g. “British” versus “French”, “dogs versus cats”, “rock” versus “pop”). The way that researchers have conceptualized categorization has evolved over time. The view used to be that there was a precise definition of category boundaries (Smith & Medin, 1981). Bruner, Goodnow, and Austin (1956), for instance, postulated that category
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membership was determined via defined features (i.e. an animal with three body divisions, six legs, an external skeleton, and a rapid reproductive system is therefore an insect). If just one of these attributes was missing the animal was quite simply something else. It soon became clear, however, that a rigid system of all-or-nothing categorization does not capture the flexibility and fluidity of human perception. Many categories have uncer- tain or “fuzzy” boundaries (Rosch, 1978) and do not fit in with a strict classification sys- tem (e.g. a dog is more “pet-like” than an iguana, despite having the same “pet” attributes). A more flexible view of categorization argues that it is not defined attributes that deter- mine category membership, but members can be more or less typical of a category (Labov, 1973). Importantly, typicality is variable; group members can be highly typical or highly atypical of a category. What defines typicality is the prototype of the category. Prototypes are the most representative members of a category (Barsalou, 1991); categorization of less typical members may be slower or prone to error because they are less available. In other words, we can conceptualize the extent to which a category member is prototypical of that category to the extent that it is easy to bring to mind. Think for a moment about an item of fruit. We bet you thought of an apple or an orange (for 99 per cent of you at least). We’re pretty certain you did not think of a kiwi fruit, and almost certainly not a tomato. Apples and oranges are highly prototypical of the category “fruit”, and are easy to bring to mind. In contrast, kiwi fruit and tomatoes, while still members of the fruit category, are quite atypical, and so are brought to mind far less easily. The high probability of people bring- ing prototypical group members to mind when categorizing others can lead to errors. The prototype of the category “engineers”, for instance, is a male, which may lead to errors in categorization when encountering a female engineer.
So categories are defined by prototypes. When we are dealing with social categories, we can refer to prototypes as stereotypes. But how do prototypes and stereotypes form in the first place? Why do we come to perceive some characteristics as typical of certain cate- gories and some not? Social learning and exposure clearly play a role (we discuss these in more detail below). But there is another way in which specifically negative stereotypes can come to be associated with minority groups. This is something called the illusory corre- lation. Illusory correlation describes the belief that two variables are associated with one another when in fact there is little or no actual association (Hamilton & Gifford, 1976). In their classic experiment, Hamilton and Gifford asked participants to read information about people from two made-up groups, group A and group B. Twice as much information was provided about Group A (the majority) than Group B (the minority). In addition, twice as much of the information provided for both groups involved desirable behaviors rather than undesirable behaviors. Despite there being no actual correlation between group membership and the proportion of positive or negative information provided, in a subsequent phase where participants were asked to attribute the behaviors they had seen to the two groups, more of the undesirable negative behaviors were attributed to Group B, the minority group, than Group A, the majority
