A Group By Any Other Name—The Role of Entitativity in Group Perception

The social world consists of numerous and diverse groupings of people into meaningful and important collectives. As perceivers, we routinely encounter aggregates of people, some of which we endow with the property of groupness, and others we do not. Moreover, the variety of groups is enormous, yet perceivers differentiate among them and understand their properties. This chapter discusses how and why perceivers “see” an aggregate of persons as a group, the distinctions among different types of groups that perceivers detect, the variation among groups in their perceived groupness or entitativity, and the consequences that follow from perceiving a group as an entitative unit. The results of our research program addressing these issues are summarized, and implications for remaining unanswered questions are discussed.