The present research indicates that perceivers’ beliefs about a group’s level of entitativity can affect the extent to which group members are implicitly compared with one another. To find evidence for these implicit comparisons, a variation of the Ebbinghaus illusion was used. Experiment 1 demonstrated that an identical set of faces produced a greater illusion (indicating greater implicit comparison) when the faces were said to represent fraternity/sorority members than when the faces were said to represent men or women born in the month of May. Experiment 2 replicated these results and also demonstrated that participants’ prior beliefs about how entitative these groups are predicted the magnitude of the Ebbinghaus illusion produced. These findings indicate that entitativity beliefs can have implicit effects on judgment such that members of highly entitative groups are subject to greater intragroup comparison than are members of nonentitative groups.
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