Social Reference Points

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