The Minority Dilemma in Communication: Why Minority Labels Are Overrepresented in News Coverage

Minority group membership is often explicitly mentioned in news reports, while majority membership is unstated. This results in an overrepresentation of minority labels in negative contexts (e.g., crime reports). While this may reflect motivated biases to derogate minorities, we propose it may also result from a basic cognitive principle of differentiation. Distinctive features, such as minority status, are more likely to attract attention, be remembered, and be communicated. Across five studies ( N = 905), we found that participants were more likely to mention individuals’ minority membership than majority membership when summarizing both negative and positive events. This communicative asymmetry persisted even when group labels were incidental and evaluatively neutral, and it was also evident in large language models trained on human data. The disproportionate communication of minority memberships creates a “minority dilemma” in news reporting: Because news media contexts are often negative, people may form overly negative stereotypes toward minorities.