General Principles and Individual Differences in the Self as a Habitual Reference Point: An Examination of Self-Other Judgments of Similarity

It has been suggested that the “self” is a relatively stable and habitually used reference point for interpreting social information. Three experiments that investigated this hypothesis by examining self-other judgments of similarity are reported. It has been demonstrated that habitual reference points create asymmetries in similarity judgments; using a feature-matching approach, these effects were examined in the context of self-other judgments of similarity. It was hypothesized that when judging the similarity of the self to others, subjects would focus their attention on the self, and judgments of similarity would be reduced to the extent that subjects were able to identify features of the self that are not shared by others. In contrast, it was hypothesized that when judging the similarity of others to the self, subjects would focus attention on others, and judgments of similarity would be reduced as more unique features of others were identified. It was posited that the self serves as a habitual reference point for interpreting social information, and that this would create asymmetries such that others are seen as more similar to the self than the self is to others. Experiment 1 demonstrated that this is true when the comparison stimulus is a generalized other, and Experiment 2 replicated this effect, using five specific individuals as the comparison stimuli. Experiment 3 demonstrated that, as predicted by the theory, these effects are systematically mediated by individual differences along dimensions related to the use of the self as a habitual reference point.