Ameliorating Some Negative Effects of Positive Mood: Encouraging Happy People to Perceive Intragroup Variability

Abstract

Subjects in positive moods typically perceive groups as being more homogeneous than do subjects in neutral moods (Stroessner & Mackie, 1992). Two experiments tested the idea that increasing the attention that happy perceivers paid to information that differentiated target group members would eliminate this effect. In Experiment 1, salience of distinguishing information was manipulated by either attributing stereotype-inconsistent information to a number of mildly atypical group members or attributing the same stereotype-inconsistent information to a few extremely atypical, and therefore highly salient, group members. In Experiment 2, the salience of distinguishing information was manipulated by asking subjects to merely read descriptions of the group members or to sort them into subgroups on the basis of similarities and differences. In both experiments, happy subjects perceived the group as more homogeneous than did subjects in neutral moods when distinctive information was not made salient, but perceived the group in a manner similar to their neutral mood counterparts when the distinctive information was made salient.