Target entitativity:

It is hypothesized that perceptions of entitativity (i.e., seeing social targets as possessing unity, coherence, and consistency) have important implications for how one organizes information about, and forms impressions of, individual and group targets. When perceivers expect entitativity, they should form an integrated impression of the target, resulting in on-line impression formation. On the other hand, when perceivers expect little entitativity, they should not process target-relevant information in an integrative fashion, resulting in memory-based judgments. Although many factors affect perceptions of target entitativity, the current research focused on expectations of behavioral consistency. It was predicted that, in general, perceivers expect more consistency, and thus elicit stronger integrative information processing, for individual than group targets. However, when explicitly provided with similar expectancies of behavioral consistency, information processing should be similar for both individual and group targets. In two experiments, participants were given one of three expectancies (low consistency, high consistency, or no information) about either individual or group targets. In both experiments, participants showed evidence of more integrative information processing for individual targets (compared to groups) and for both individual and group targets that were described as high (relative to low) in behavioral consistency. Experiment 2 also demonstrated that illusory correlations form for targets expected to be low in behavioral consistency (where memory-based judgments occurred). These results suggest that perceptions of target entitativity, and expectations of behavioral consistency specifically, play a critical role in social information processing.