Most research on liking of persons and groups has been conducted within separate paradigms, but the implicit assumption has been that the same processes govern judgments of liking or disliking regardless of the nature of the target. Departing from this assumption, we suggest a dual-process hypothesis according to which people base their liking of a target person primarily on the desirability of the person's characteristics, whereas they base their liking of a group primarily on the degree of similarity between the group and themselves. To test this hypothesis, participants were presented with either positively or negatively valenced sketches that either described an individual person or a group of people. Path analyses revealed that liking of a person was best predicted by desirability ratings, whereas liking of a group was best predicted by similarity ratings. Implications of these ยฎndings for stereotype maintenance are discussed. # 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
People, as individuals or as groups, are the primary objects of social perception, and evaluative responses are integral parts of that perception. Not surprisingly, much of social perception research is concerned with the favourability of the percept, or more CCC 0046ยฑ2772/98/030457ยฑ13$17.50