André Vaz

And what's to me very interesting about this is that they don't know any more about the individual than they know about the group, right?

If we think about the group on average, and this is just a random person, there should be no differences, but people do make those judgments more positively about the individual.

And yeah, so one reason that we find in that, and I think kind of connects to the argument I made earlier that we interact with individuals, is that

When people think about the possibility that they might be wrong, you know, say that you're making a judgment about someone and maybe later you find out that you're wrong.

Whether or not the person ever finds out that you made that judgment, you find out that you're wrong, how guilty would you feel, right?

How mean would you feel that you were?

And turns out people actually think that they, I don't know if they actually would feel guiltier, but they anticipate that they would feel guiltier

if they were cynical towards an individual than a collective.

And then, of course, that means that by necessity, you almost sort of raise your judgments up to make sure that you're not wrong.

And like I said, I think this connects to that functional argument that, yeah, I interact with individuals in my day-to-day life.

I don't want to be wrong.

There's almost a norm that you can't really doubt the moral character of other people.

I would say yes, in big part, yes.

I mean, one of our studies, we don't just show this dissociation between individuals and groups, but we even differentiate between a group as in just the other participants in the study, right?

Which presumably is a bit closer to the participant because it's other participants like themselves and society in general.

And we find that for society in general, people were even more cynical.

So definitely, as these groups become more anonymous, more abstract,

there's a tendency to be even more cynical.

And so, of course, I think that really contributes to this effect in day-to-day life.

I mean, to give an example, there's this one study as well that shows that people generally are cynical about congresspeople, but not their own congress, you know, the congressman or woman of their status.