Individual differences in cues to the favorability of groups

People join groups for various reasons – to feel that they belong, achieve great things because unity makes strength etc. (Abele et al., 2021; Koch et al., 2021). However, membership in some groups only brings trouble. Thus, people want to know the favorability of their current groups and alternatives. Unfortunately, flawless judgment of groups’ favorability is what dreams are made of. To put it in terms of Brunswik’s (1952) lens model, people must rely on proximal, manifest cues to judge the distal, latent truth of groups’ favorability, and they will make more errors than they prefer because cues are noisy. So what cues do people use?