Social reference points.

The authors performed two experiments in which subjects were asked to makesimilarity judgments about social concepts, varying the direction of the compar-ison specified by the question. Asymmetries in rated similarity were used todiagnose concepts that function as habitual reference points. In Experiment 1subjects rated a friend as more similar to themselves than vice versa along bothsocial and physical dimensions, suggesting that the self served as a reference point.In Experiment 2 subjects made global similarity comparisons between themselvesand typical examples of various social stereotypes. Directional asymmetries wereinversely related to the extent of subjects' knowledge about the stereotypes: Theself acted as a reference point with respect to stereotypes with few known attributesbut not with respect to those with many attributes. The relation between levelof self-monitoring and asymmetry effects was weak and inconsistent across thetwo experiments. The results suggest that concepts serving as social referencepoints vary across judgment contexts in accord with general cognitive models ofsimilarity comparisons.