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The Sky is Falling, But Not on Me: A Cautionary Tale of Illusions of Control, in Four Acts

Georgetown University

Charles Studer

Switzerland

Since the early 1980s, researchers have attempted to unravel the sources of a tendency for minority group members to report higher levels of discrimination directed at their group than at them selves personally. The favored explanation for this personal/group discrimination discrepancy has been denial of personal discrimi nation. However, subsequent research has revealed that this discrep ancy is not specific to the domain of discrimination, or to negative events, or even to minoritygroup members. Rather, it is a generalized personal/group discrepancy, perhaps explained by a culture-based heuristic that leads people to calculate the magnitude of the effect of an event to be proportional to the size of the social unit being affected. Thusgroups are affected more than individual persons and the size of the effect increases with the size of the group.

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