Definition
- A category of members is the set of those who share a property, such as supporting a club or holding a nationality. Under salience, members are perceived as interchangeable with respect to that property.
- A group entity is a collection taken as one bounded whole, by the arrangement of relations among its members rather than their likeness. Families and orchestras are the paradigm cases. Skorich (THEORY-1112) holds that perceiving people as a group entity requires cues that they share mental states.
The distinction is Skorich’s (NOTE-1295): accentuating the likeness of a category’s members makes them interchangeable, not one. León’s close-relationship “we” (THEORY-1115) is a group entity whose members are the opposite of interchangeable.
It would let the record say precisely what CASE-104 and CASE-100 keep needing. “The fans” (people who support the club) is a category. A fanbase seen to share an intention, such as a boycott or a supporters’ trust, is a group entity, and only that is a candidate holder of a stance (CLAIM-490, CLAIM-493).
What it is not
- Not a group agent in social ontology’s sense. A group entity is perceived as one; whether it acts as one is a further question (QUESTION-119).
- Not entitativity as a degree. Campbell’s (1958) graded “entitativity” measures how much a collection looks like a unit. This term marks a difference in kind between a set and a whole.
- Proposed, not adopted. It is a candidate until a CLAIM is stated in it and the owner adopts it.
Note of 2026-10-29: a category made an entity
Castano et al. (NOTE-1297) report that a reminder of death made Italian students see “Italians”, a category of members, as more of an entity: entitativity rose from 4.77 to 5.40 (N = 48). The authors read it as an “attempt to reify the ingroup”, so that it can outlast the self. If it holds, the line this term draws is one that perceivers move under threat. It is one small study, of an effect that Many Labs 4 failed to replicate in another paradigm (NOTE-1322).