Broadening the conditions for illusory correlation formation: Implications for judging minority groups

Perceivers tend to overestimate the relative degree of association between an infrequent or dis-tinctive category of behavior and a minority group or target, an illusory correlation effect with implications for numerous social processes including stereotyping and product perception. We argue that such illusory correlations can form under a broader set of conditions than has been previously shown. Experiments 1 and 2 demonstrated that illusory correlations can emerge even when no distinctive behaviors are presented (i.e., in the absence of co-occurrences of infrequent events). Experiments 2 and 3 showed that perceivers are more likely to form strong illusory cor-relations when the difference in the amount of information describing majority versus minority groups is large rather than small. These findings support a process account suggesting that illu-sory correlations can form merely as a result of differences in the amount of information ac-quired about targets; minority group targets are assumed to have more moderate characteristics than majority group targets because of the relatively limited minority group evidence that is available. We discuss implications regarding stereotyping and intergroup relations as well as perceptions of consumer brands in the marketplace. People often make judgments about the predictive relations between social characteristics. Indeed, the perception of covariation among characteristics of the social environment (e.g., between ethnicity and behavioral tendencies) is impor-tant in a variety of social processes. Unfortunately, as numer-ous studies have demonstrated, covariation estimation is a difficult task and people commonly form illusory correla-tions, or overestimations of the relation between two charac