PERSONALITY AND SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY BULLETIN Quinn et al. / PGDD AND INFORMATIONAL COMPLEXITY The Personal/Group Discrimination Discrepancy: The Role of Informational Complexity

The personal/group discrimination discrepancy (PGDD) refers to the tendency of disadvantaged group members to report higher levels of discrimination against their group in general than against themselves personally as members of that group. In two studies, the authors examined the cognitive mechanisms that underlie the PGDD. In Experiment 1, the authors demonstrated that the PGDD emerges from a divergence in the comparison standards on which personal and group judgments are made and that specifying that the same standards be used for both types of judgments eliminates or reduces the PGDD. In Experi-ment 2, the authors demonstrated that the magnitude of the PGDD was a function of the degree of informational complexity in the comparison targets. Implications for conceptualizations of the PGDD are discussed. The label “personal/group discrimination discrep-ancy ” (PGDD) has been used to describe the tendency of disadvantaged group members to report higher levels of discrimination directed at their group in general than at themselves personally as members of that group (Taylor, Wright, Moghaddam, & Lalonde, 1990). For example, when asked about gender discrimination, a woman might respond, “Yes, women are discriminated against, but I have not experienced much discrimination. ” This phenomenon was first documented by Crosby (1982) in her studies of relative deprivation among working women in Boston. It has been demonstrated with a wide variety of disadvantaged groups, including employed women in the United States (Crosby, 1982, 1984); single mothers receiving government assistance in Canad