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False consensus and the outgroup homogeneity effect: interference in measurement or intrinsically dependent processes?
Author(s) -
De La Haye AnneMarie
Publication year - 2001
Publication title -
european journal of social psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.609
H-Index - 111
eISSN - 1099-0992
pISSN - 0046-2772
DOI - 10.1002/ejsp.59
Subject(s) - outgroup , ascription , psychology , social psychology , attribution , homogeneity (statistics) , phenomenon , statistics , mathematics , epistemology , philosophy
In studies on the Outgroup Homogeneity Effect (OHE), a common measure is percentage estimates. A possible difficulty is that percentage estimates are also sensitive to the False Consensus Effect (FCE). I present an experiment aimed at analysing how these two phenomena interact. Engineering and business students indicated whether behaviour descriptions were true or false for themselves, then estimated the percentages of members of each group who would self‐ascribe the same items. In order to bring the OHE to light while controlling for self‐ascription, an item‐per‐item analysis is necessary. In such an analysis, the OHE must appear as over‐attribution of any item by members of the group for which the item is not typical. I examined whether this effect appeared among subjects who either did or did not ascribe each item to themselves. This was done through an ANOVA where items were entered as the random factor. The False Consensus and the Outgroup Homogeneity effects both showed up in this analysis, but they interacted with each other in such a way that they could be different aspects of the same phenomenon. The consequences of this unexpected finding for the definition of the OHE are discussed. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.