The Personal/Group Discrimination Discrepancy: Responses to Experimentally Induced Personal and Group Discrimination

Abstract

Participants in research on discrimination consistently perceived a higher level of discrimination directed at their group as a whole than at themselves as individual members of that group. Explanations for this personal/group discrimination discrepancy are all based on the assumption that some form of perceptual distortion is operating. However, research has not allowed for any measure of the objective reality of people'S experiences with discrimination, and thus there has been no objective standard against which researchers can test for perceptual distortion. This study involved the experimental inducement of personal and group discrimination, alone and in combination, among female students. The results indicated that subjects responded to objective reality and that personal experiences with discrimination affected their perceptions at the group level more than the reverse.