An experiment was conducted to test the hypothesis that when a belief was at issue, agreement from a dissimilar other would increase judgmental confidence more than agreement from a similar other; whereas when a value was at issue, agreement from a similar other would be more influential. The subjects judged either the relative academic success of two students (belief) or which of the two they liked more (value). The subjects were given an evaluation of the students by another subject who they had been led to believe was similar or dissimilar to themselves in terms of his style of judging other people. In all cases, the evaluation subjects received agreed with their own. The results supported the predictions.
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Goethals et al. (1973) studied this question.