Group composition, salience, and cognitive representations: The phenomenology of being in a group

Abstract

A series of meta-analytic integrations is summarized, and a perspective on what it is like to be a member of a group is described. Proportionate group sizes are demonstrated to predict the magnitude of a variety of effects at the interface between social cognition and group processes. Self-focused attention, the participation-leadership effect, social projection, ingroup bias, relative heterogeneity, and binocular resolution effects are all demonstrated to vary in predictable ways as a function of proportionate group sizes. These patterns link group composition to salience of ingroup and outgroup, and to prototype or exemplar representation of information about the ingroup or the outgroup. Discussion considers implications of this model of the phenomenology of being in a group.