The Role of Self-Referent and Other-Referent Knowledge in Perceptions of Group Characteristics

Research on social projection shows that perceptions of group characteristics depend, in part, on people’s perceptions of themselves. According to the principles of inductive reasoning, however, knowledge of other individual group members should also predict perceptions of the group. The present studies directly compared the use of self- and other-referent knowledge. In Study 1, self-judgments predicted group judgments better than judgments about a familiar other person did. When differences in the accessibility and stability of self-referent and other-referent knowledge were controlled, the predictive advantage of self-referent knowledge disappeared. In Study 2, the other person was present during assessment (i.e., visually salient) and other judgments predicted group judgments as well as self-judgments did. Changes in social categorization, however, instead of increases in the individuation of the other person accounted for this finding. It is concluded that projection is best understood as an egocentric bias rather than a form of inductive reasoning.