Social comparison is a core element of human life (Festinger, 1954; Mussweiler, 2003; Tajfel, 1981; for a collection, see Suls and Wheeler, 2000). This is because comparing oneself to others is the most favored way people use to evaluate themselves. People choose to compare themselves to others with a variety of goals in mind. Obviously, a major concern would be informational: people like to know where they stand in terms of what they think, feel, or do. Are they simply normal or do they happen to be outrageously below or above widely popular standards? Often, people also rely on social comparison to motivate themselves. If getting a kick out of the comparison is the main goal of the comparison then the comparison target is likely to be some person or some group that fares slightly better. Finally, there could also be an explicit attempt at self-enhancement. By finding comparison others who are sufficiently similar yet also somewhat less knowledgeable, strong or likeable than themselves, people make sure that they will come out of the comparison with a feeling of psychological comfort. In short, people's self-knowledge, motivation, and self-esteem crucially hang on the outcome of dozens of daily comparison operations.

Although initially used in interpersonal theory contexts, the social comparison process also comes across as a major player in an impressive series of social psychology theories that focus on intergroup relations.

This chapter is about the correspondence between the psychology and social reality of devalued group membership. Well-being and the subjective satisfaction with life are, at best, modestly related to the objective conditions in which that life takes place. Often, members of minorities or otherwise devalued groups experience similar levels of self-esteem as members of objectively more privileged groups (for a review, see Crocker and Major, 1989). More surprisingly, they report very low levels of personal discrimination even if they are fully aware of the extent to which their group is discriminated against (Crosby, 1982). Thus, it would appear that they perceive themselves as less vulnerable to discrimination than the average member of their group. This discontinuity between judgments of discrimination for self and group has been called the personal-group discrimination discrepancy or PGDD (Crosby, 1982; Taylor, Wright, and Porter, 1994). It is a very robust effect that is found in a wide variety of devalued groups (Taylor, Wright, Moghaddam, and Lalonde, 1990).

The purpose of this chapter is to elaborate on prior work examining the role of social comparison processes in personal and group judgments of discrimination. Specifically, we consider the different goals and motivations involved in these perceptions and elaborate on the hypothesis that is being tested when personal versus group judgments of discrimination are made. One of the most significant consequences of social comparison activities is that they can alter feelings of entitlement, perceptions of being discriminated against, and the perceived relevance of various social categories.

The purpose of this book

Imagine for a moment a busy city intersection with a police officer controlling traffic. All of the users of that street are individuals, but they are also members of society and, like the police officer they are members of groups that help us to explain why those people act in the way they do at particular times. Indeed, individuals and groups can be said to be the central facts of society. Without individuals there could be no society, but unless individuals also perceive themselves to belong to groups, that is, to share characteristics, circumstances, values and beliefs with other people, then society would be without structure or order. These perceptions of groups are called stereotypes.

If we accept that perceptions of groups are so important for people to understand the social world, then understanding those stereotypes is also extremely important for social psychology. Social psychologists such as Asch (1952) have argued that understanding the relationship between individuals and groups is the master problem for social psychology. In addressing this problem we need to recognize though, that individuals and groups tend to have their effects on each other through their psychological representation within individual minds. That is, social objects affect us through the way they are perceived rather than through the application of physical force.

Think again of the police officer controlling traffic at a busy intersection. The police officer does not (normally) need to physically restrain the traffic from passing through the intersection.

The chapters in this book make a number of distinct contributions that help us understand the importance of explanation in stereotype formation. Despite the distinctiveness of the various contributions, a number of key themes emerge and recur. Before addressing these in more detail it is useful to remind ourselves of perhaps one key theme that has guided this volume and gives all of its contributions some common ground. Perhaps more implied than explicitly stated, all of the contributions focus on stereotype formation (and more generally ‘stereotyping’) as a dynamic psychological process embedded in intergroup relations. This point may sound like a truism, but in our view, the partial nature of some previous approaches flows from an emphasis on one or other of these two components. That is, much previous and contemporary research has tended to focus on stereotyping as a psychological process, but to neglect the social and contextual dimensions of this process (e.g., the importance of own group membership, content, the nature of the intergroup relations). Alternatively, where research has recognized the social dimension of stereotyping, it has often neglected the dynamic explanatory psychological processes involved (stereotypes as fixed structures, percepts, pictures in our heads, epiphenomena of intergroup relations or culture). If there is a common theme that brings many of the current contributions together, then, it is the attempt to integrate the cognitive and the social aspects of the stereotyping process by attention to both cognitive and social levels of explanation and analysis.

This book developed from a series of interactions between social psychologists at the Australian National University, the Catholic University at Louvain-la-Neuve and the University of Amsterdam. In fact, all of the contributors to the current volume were doing research at one or other of those institutions during the 1990s.

All of the contributors to the volume were motivated by a desire to get beyond some of the ideas about stereotyping that had so dominated work in the 1970s and 1980s and were showing remarkable powers of recovery in the 1990s. In doing this work several of us saw that despite differences in theoretical perspectives and/or our geographical location there were common threads in our work.

Many of the common ideas related to a view of stereotype formation as a search for meaning on the part of the perceiver. We used different terms for this search for meaning, such as explanation, understanding, deriving differentiated meaning, but the commonalities in what we were doing were obvious to us. The key ideas were consistent with the classic work of Bruner and had figured prominently in social psychology in work inspired by self-categorization theory and by social judgeability theory, which made the point about the link between stereotyping and meaning in a more general way.

It was perhaps in the domain of stereotype formation that the idea of sense-making had the most to offer.

Being able to make sense of the surrounding social environment is no doubt one of the major wonders of our cognitive apparatus. In most instances, perceivers encounter no difficulty in assigning people to social categories (Bodenhausen & Macrae, 1998; Fiske, 1998, 2000; Leyens, Yzerbyt & Schadron, 1994; Oakes, Haslam & Turner, 1994). According to one strand of research, such an achievement stems from people's ability to recognize regularities and patterns that are available in the social setting. From this perspective, social categories impose themselves upon observers. An alternative perspective holds that perceivers play quite an active role in the representation of the social world. Specifically, observers are thought to rely on abstract knowledge in order to organize the incoming information.

The distinction between these two approaches is a key issue whenever we ask ourselves the question of the origin of stereotypes. After all, are those beliefs that social psychologists and lay people alike call stereotypes the mere reflection of the environment in what could be seen as rather passive perceivers? In contrast, should they be seen as the product of a more active, yet partly unconscious, process that builds upon perceivers' naïve theories? In line with an impressive body of evidence, the present contribution takes it that the second viewpoint provides a more faithful description of the processes involved in the acquisition of social knowledge. That is, beliefs about a social group tend to emerge because perceivers construe the group in terms of some a priori theoretical knowledge.

Introduction

Since the seminal publications of Allport (1954) and Tajfel (1969, 1978a, 1981b), scholars interested in intergroup relations have made substantial progress in their understanding of the conditions under which categorization influences the perception of individuals and groups (for a recent discussion, see McGarty, 1999). Among the most basic and powerful categorization effects underlying social perception are accentuation effects which consist in the perceiver's tendency to come up with more extreme and more homogeneous impressions of stimuli that are positioned along a perceptual continuum whenever these stimuli are assigned to distinct categories. Depending on the specific perceptual setting, categorization may result from a natural disposition of the perceptual system (see, for instance, Harnad, 1987) or from an explicit association between the stimuli and category labels at the time of judgement (see, for instance, Tajfel & Wilkes, 1963). These distinctions notwithstanding, category assignment or the mere presence of a context category at the judgement stage (which conceptually amounts to the same thing) will result in the accentuation of the perceived difference between and perceived resemblance within the two classes of stimuli (in the social psychology literature) or in a better discrimination across than within the category boundaries (in the cognitive psychology literature).

The accentuation effects can be seen as a natural consequence of the categorization process.