HOW CONTEXT-INDEPENDENT IS THE OUTGROUP HOMOGENEITY EFFECT - A RESPONSE

Bartsch and Judd (1993) argue that outgroup homogeneity effects occur independently of any tendency for members of minority groups to see th eir ingroup as more homogeneous than the majority outgroup. This argum ent is based on evidence of an underlying outgroup homogeneity effect in a study which purports to unconfound the roles of judged group size and ingroup-outgroup judgement by presenting subjects first with a sm all or large ingroup (or outgroup) and then a small comparison outgrou p (or ingroup). However, from the perspective of self-categorization t heory (SCT), such a procedure actually introduces a confound as SCT pr edicts that when an ingroup is judged first it should be perceived as relatively heterogeneous due to the intragroup nature of this judgemen tal context. Close examination of Bartsch and Judd's data bears this p oint out: the tendency to see the ingroup as less homogeneous than the outgroup when the ingroup was judged first was extinguished when the ingroup was judged second even when the judged groups were of equal si ze. Consistent with SCT, this re-analysis suggests that manifestations of outgroup homogeneity are not independent of contextual factors whi ch determine the relative appropriateness of category-based perception of ingroup and outgroup.