Intergroup relations and polarization of individual and collective judgments.

Abstract

Confirms the hypothesis that the opinion of a group is more extreme than the average of the opinions of the individual members. 80 undergraduates were Ss. The experiment, which involved members of a group who were asked to describe their own membership group, also showed that when Ss were confronted with the presumed opinion of a rival group concerning their group, their individual and collective responses became even more polarized and tended to coincide more frequently with views expressed at the outset by extremists. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)