Group Homogeneity

From the social identity approach and social categorization theory to more recent research linked, for instance, to the common ingroup identity model, outgroup homogenization has been an issue of concern to intergroup relations and the outgroup’s well-being. This chapter addresses the question of the extent to which individual minorities are presented as homogenous groups. For this purpose, we explore the degree to which newspaper articles on Jews and Judaism in the West and Muslims and Islam in the West, contain information on individuals or the topic of intragroup diversity. We find both groups to be portrayed by making use of stereotypes which mainly contextualize Jews as victims and targets of anti-Semitism, and Muslims as foreign religious extremists posing a threat to the West as well as, to a lesser degree, as a group of vulnerable refugees. We relate our results to the previous chapters, thus bringing together the insights gained from the qualitative analysis and quantitative analyses. We discuss how the different aspects of social roles and reported acculturation strategies as well as the emotional language used in the articles and the detected phenomenal structures hint at a rather unifying portrayal of the two minority groups.