Do people perceive others as being similar to themselves?
Researchers test alternative sources of assumed similarity in personality judgments
People do indeed perceive others as being similar to themselves when it comes to those characteristics that align with their individual value system. Thus, assumed similarity cannot simply be attributed to benevolent perceivers judging others in a more benevolent fashion. People uniquely see their values being shared by others. The new publication Trait-specificity versus global positivity: A critical test of alternative sources of assumed similarity in personality judgments by Isabel Thielmann (Research Group Leader) arrives at this conclusion. The publication has just been accepted by the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
In everyday social interactions we are regularly required to judge what others, including strangers, are like. Up until now, research suggested that people perceive others as similar to themselves, at least with regard to certain characteristics. Such so-called “assumed similarity” effects are classically interpreted as people seeing their own characteristics in others, that is, projecting themselves onto others.
However, a potential alternative explanation for this interpretation has not yet been adequately tested. This alternative explanation is that more benevolent people simply judge others more benevolently – that is, more positively – in general, without involving any processes of projecting their own (benevolent) characteristics onto them. This would suggest that assumed similarity is an artifact of a more general “positivity bias” in judgments of others rather than a unique phenomenon.
This alternative explanation has now been tested and ruled out by Isabel Thielmann, Research Group Leader at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Crime, Security and Law, and her colleagues in two large-scale studies with almost 6,000 participants. In these studies, the participants were first asked to describe themselves and were then shown screenshots of social media profiles or videos of different persons which they had to judge according to the same trait-descriptive adjectives used for the self-description.
The results of these studies make it apparent that the convergence between how people perceive themselves and how they perceive others is indeed partly attributable to the content of the characteristics being judged: People do perceive others as sharing some of their characteristics. However, these assumed similarity effects are only apparent for characteristics that are strongly linked to universal values, such as honesty. Isabel Thielmann’s results are thus consistent with the conclusion that true assumed similarity does exist for value-related traits.
Thielmann, I., Rau, R., & Locke, K. D. (in press). Trait-specificity versus global positivity: A critical test of alternative sources of assumed similarity in personality judgments. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
Online Preprint