Social projection and cognitive differentiation co-explain self-enhancement and in-group favoritism

The Inductive Reasoning Model (IRM; Krueger et al., 2024) makes two assumptions. First, people’s self-concept is positive; they are aware that they have more positive attributes than negative attributes. Second, when people are uncertain about another person’s or group’s attributes, they project their own attributes onto them because they are aware that social entities are similar to one another (i.e., share attributes). This social projection decreases with increasing social distance between the self and the other person or group. The IRM combines self-positivity and differential social projection to predict the size of four effects in the social psychological literature: self-enhancement, in group favoritism, intergroup accentuation, and differential accuracy (i.e., a more accurate description of in-groups vs. out-groups). We appreciate the IRM’s parsimony and generativity, and we draw on our and other previous research to discuss its validity and generality by focusing on a related cognitive-ecological model of impression formation.