David Hamilton
University of California, Santa Barbara
Perceiving Groups as Entities:
When, Why, How, and So What?
Lazenby Hall, Room 34, at 4:00 PM
on Thursday, February 25, 1999
All of us perceive, interact with, confront, and respond to a variety of social groups in
many different contexts in everyday life. In many cases whether and how we perceive the
"groupness" of social groups can have important consequences, both for us as
perceivers and for the groups that are perceived. Yet not all groupings of persons are
endowed, by perceivers, with the property of being a group. In this talk I will discuss
recent research investigating the perception of groups, in particular, the perception that
a collection of individuals has the qualities of being a group. I will explore (1) how
(and on what basis) perceivers detect the quality of "groupness" in a collection
of individual persons, (2) when they are more or less likely to perceive a group as
possessing that quality, (3) why perceivers see groupness (and different
types of groupness) in groups, and (4) what consequences the perception of groupness has
for other social psychological phenomena.
David Hamilton
Professor
Dept of Psychology, UC Santa Barbara
Santa Barbara, CA 93106
(805) 893-2456
hamilton@psych.ucsb.edu
http://www.psych.ucsb.edu/fac/hamilton.htm
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