Broadening the Conditions for Illusory Correlation Formation: Implications for Judging Minority Groups

Abstract

Perceivers tend to overestimate the relative degree of association between an infrequent or distinctive category of behavior and a minority group or target, an illusory correlation effect with implications for numerous social processes including stereotyping and product perception. We argue that such illusory correlations can form under a broader set of conditions than has been previously shown. Experiments 1 and 2 demonstrated that illusory correlations can emerge even when no distinctive behaviors are presented (i.e., in the absence of co-occurrences of infrequent events). Experiments 2 and 3 showed that perceivers are more likely to form strong illusory correlations when the difference in the amount of information describing majority versus minority groups is large rather than small. These findings support a process account suggesting that illusory correlations can form merely as a result of differences in the amount of information acquired about targets; minority group targets are assumed to have more moderate characteristics than majority group targets because of the relatively limited minority group evidence that is available. We discuss implications regarding stereotyping and intergroup relations as well as perceptions of consumer brands in the marketplace.People often make judgments about the predictive relations between social characteristics. Indeed, the perception of covariation among characteristics of the social environment (e.g., between ethnicity and behavioral tendencies) is important in a variety of social processes. Unfortunately, as numerous studies have demonstrated, covariation estimation is a difficult task and people commonly form illusory correlations, or overestimations of the relation between two characteristics or events (e.g., Chapman & Chapman, 1967;Pryor, 1986;Schaller & Maass, 1989;Shaklee & Mims, 1982;Stroessner, Hamilton, & Mackie, 1992).Past studies (e.g., Chapman, 1967;Hamilton & Gifford, 1976) have demonstrated that perceivers are particularly prone to forming a distinctiveness-based illusory correlation, or an overestimation of the relative degree of association between an infrequent category of behavior and a minority group. Hamilton and Gifford demonstrated the tendency to form such illusory correlations. Participants in their study read a series of sentences, each of which described a behavior by a member of one of two groups (Group A or Group B), and most of which were either desirable or undesirable. More statements described members of Group A than Group B (i.e., Group B was, by definition, the minority group), but the proportion of favorable to unfavorable statements was the same. Thus, there was no relation between group membership and the favorability of behaviors. Nevertheless, participants evidenced a distinctiveness-based illu-