Merging insights from the intergroup relations literature and terror management theory, the authors conducted an experiment in which they assessed the impact of death-related thoughts on a series of ingroup measures. Participants in the mortalitysalience condition displayed stronger ingroup identification, perceived greater ingroup entitativity, and scored higher on ingroup bias measures. Also, perceived ingroup entitativity as well as ingroup identification mediated the effect of the mortality salience manipulation on ingroup bias. The findings are discussed in relation to theories of intergroup relations and terror management theory. A new perspective on the function of group belonging also is presented.

According to a social judgeability analysis, a crucial determinant of impression formation is the extent to which people feel entitled to judge a target person. Two experiments tested the impact of the subjective availability of individuating information on a social judgment independent of its actual presence. In Experiment 1, people made a stereotypical judgment when they believed individuating information was present even if no information was in fact given. In Experiment 2, Ss who thought they received individuating information made more extreme and confident judgments than Ss who thought they received category information. This indicates that Ss' judgments were not simply a function of implicit demand: The illusion of receiving individuating information led Ss to believe they possessed the necessary evidence for legitimate decision making. This result supports the existence of rules in the social inference process.According to most social-cognitive accounts, an impression stems from a match between categorical and individuating information, or between theories about data and actual data. When forming an impression, perceivers have to consider the wealth of the categorical information as well as the rich concreteness of the individuating evidence (for a review, see Fiske & Taylor, 1991).Recent research on person perception shows that cognitive and motivational variables contribute to finding this optimal match. For instance, consideration of the base rates provided by the category (Ginossar & Trope, 1987), accessibility of alternative hypotheses (Kruglanski & Mayseless, 1988), and attention to inconsistent individuating information (Neuberg & Fiske, 1987) are cognitive factors that determine "adequate" impression formation. Also, accuracy goals (Kruglanski, 1989(Kruglanski, , 1990,

In line with our subjective essentialist view of stereotypes (Yzerbyt, Rocher, & Schadron, 1997), we propose that two classes offactors that mutually reinforce each other influence the perception ofgroups. The perception ofa strong level ofsimilarity and organization among group members (i.e., group entitativity) suggests the existence ofa deep essence that would account for the detected regularities. Conversely, the existence ofnaive theories regarding the presence ofan underlying core encourages the searchfor resemblances and connections within the group. After a shortpresentation of the recent literature dealing with the concepts of entitativity and essentialism, we review a series ofstudiesfrom our laboratory showing the impact of entitativity on essentialism as well as the influence of essentialism on entitativity. We also provide empirical evidence for this bidirectional process from both the outsider and the insider perspective. Finally, we examine the potential role of cultural differences both in the ascription ofafundamental nature to an entitative assembly ofpeople and in the use ofa priori naive theories to create surface similarity among group members. As a set, these efforts point to the importance oftaking into account the constant dialogue between perceivers' theory-based explanations and group members' perceptual characteristics if one wishes to understand group stereotypes.

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