Abstract

The present research investigates motives behind our choice of social judgment strategies. While the projection literature clearly establishes the pervasiveness of people's tendency to falsely assume that others share their own thoughts, desires, and feelings, the stereotyping literature provides an abundance of evidence that we also tend to overestimate the extent to which individuals share stereotypical characteristics with various social groups. There have been few attempts to bridge these literatures together and to delineate exactly when perceivers might choose one method over the other. One model that attempts to uncover factors which influence our choice of social judgment strategies is the similarity-contingency model of social inference which suggests that when perceivers assume higher levels of general similarity to a target, they engage in increased projection, whereas if they assume lower levels of similarity they engage in increased stereotyping. However, it is unclear how such similarity perceptions are generated in the first place. The goal of the present research is to examine one possible motive behind similarity perceptions, whether we distance ourselves from others that represent undesired aspects of ourselves and move closer to others that represent desired selves, and whether this in turn leads us to project vs. stereotype respectively. These hypotheses were tested in three studies in which participants shared either two positive traits, two negative traits, or no traits with three different targets. After reading a description of the target who was described in terms of two positive and two negative traits (of which two were either shared or none were shared), participants rated their perceived similarity to the target and his/her likely mental states in an ambiguous scenario. Results for all three studies supported the hypotheses that sharing positive similarities leads to perceptions of greater overall similarity and greater projection when compared with both negative and no similarities, whereas sharing negative similarities leads to perceptions of less similarity and greater stereotyping. Study three further substantiated the claim that these affects were due to self-enhancement concerns by demonstrating that they can be exacerbated by a self-image threat and lessened by a self-affirmation experience.