Entitativity and Collective Responsibility

Groups can be very closely knit, very entitative, or more distantly knit. In previous research, these judgments have been treated as consistent positions on different groups. Here we test whether people's pre-existing attitudes about a group can lead them to shift their judgments of a group's entitativity in a way that is consistent with their desired outcomes of when to consider the group collectively responsible for the actions of individual members.