Perceiving minority members as individuals: the effects of relative group size in social categorization

According to the account by comparative distinctiveness, minorities draw attention by virtue of their relative size, leading to more individuation and more stereotyping of their members. Using the 'Who said what?' paradigm by Taylor Fiske, Etcoff, and Ruderman (1978) in Klauer and Wegener's (1998) modified version, relative group size of gender categories and age categories was varied in a pilot study and a main experiment, respectively. In the pilot study, memory for discussion statements and in both studies, memory for individuating information increased as subgroup size decreased. Rating measures obtained in the main experiment revealed most stereotyping of minority, members. The findings thereby support major predictions of the account by comparative distinctiveness, but demonstrate dissociations between different modes of category-based processing, i.e. category memory, reconstructive category use, and stereotyping. Copyright (C) 2002 John Wiley Sons, Ltd.