Since the early 1980s, researchers have attempted to unravel the
sources of a tendency for minority group members to report higher
levels of discrimination directed at their group than at them
selves personally. The favored explanation for this personal/group
discrimination discrepancy has been denial of personal discrimi
nation. However, subsequent research has revealed that this discrep
ancy is not specific to the domain of discrimination, or to negative
events, or even to minoritygroup members. Rather, it is a generalized
personal/group discrepancy, perhaps explained by a culture-based
heuristic that leads people to calculate the magnitude of the effect
of an event to be proportional to the size of the social unit being
affected. Thusgroups are affected more than individual persons and
the size of the effect increases with the size of the group.
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