Haters are all the same: Perceptions of group homogeneity following positive vs. negative feedback

• Individuals who are judged negatively by a group regard the members of the group as relatively homogenous.
• Doing so calls into question the reliability of the group's negative appraisal so that it can be dismissed.

The more similar the members of a group are to one another, the less reliable their collective judgments are likely to be. One way for individuals to respond to negative feedback from a group may thus be to adjust their perceptions of the group's homogeneity, enabling them to dismiss the feedback as unreliable. We show that individuals appreciate this logic (Study 1) and that they put it to strategic use by regarding the members of a group as more homogenous when the group judges them negatively than when it judges them positively (Studies 2, 3, and 4). We underscore the self-protective nature of this tendency by showing that individuals adjust their perceptions of a group's homogeneity more when they themselves are the target of the group's judgment than when the group judges someone else (Study 4).