Testing the similarity-projection hypothesis using the reaction time paradigm: Anchoring and adjustment in social judgments
It has long been argued that people use their own mental states to infer those of others who they perceive as similar to themselves. Tamir and Mitchell (2013) examined this hypothesis through the reaction time paradigm and demonstrated a positive relationship between the reaction time of other’s mental state judgments and the distance of judgments from the participants’ mental states as an evidence of using projection. However, their methodology was limited, and the robustness of the paradigm was not well examined. We conducted a series of studies employing different types of tasks and target persons based on Tamir and Mitchell’s (2013) study. The results of Studies 1 and 2 were consistent with the hypothesis, that is, a long reaction time in judging the preferences of a target predicted inconsistency between the judgments for the target and participants’ own selves only when the former was perceived to be similar to the latter. Although, when this relationship was observed in Study 3, the target person was perceived not only as similar but also as dissimilar. In this paper, we discuss that projection may more likely be used when information about targets is scarce, irrespective of the perceived similarity to the target person.