UC Riverside

People tend to see themselves as similar to their ingroup, and people often accomplish similarity with others by projecting their self-beliefs onto their perceptions of others. However, existing research on self-anchoring has not considered the within-person cognitive mechanisms facilitating this process. The current study aims to establish the similarity-based (i.e., if I am outgoing, my group ought to be characteristic of semantically similar traits such as sociable and fun) and contrastive (i.e., what is characteristic of my ingroup in contrast to a given outgroup) mechanisms by which people's self-evaluations on traits generalize to ingroup evaluations. Across three studies using minimal groups (N = 61), university groups (N = 283), and racial groups (N = 265), we find that people use semantic similarity among traits to infer the extent to which traits ought to be characteristic of their group if related traits are characteristic of themselves. We further find that this tendency is primarily driven by a motivation to achieve similarity with the ingroup rather than dissimilarity from the outgroup. However, in the racial context, racial minority participants contrasting against the racial majority were driven moreso to achieve dissimilarity from the majority outgroup. We fit a computational model measuring the extent to which people convert self-beliefs into ingroup-beliefs prior to generalization, and find that this tendency was weaker when people contrasted their ingroup against an outgroup that they felt more positively about (i.e., the higher status university in Study 2 and the fellow minority racial group is Study 3), reflecting that self-anchoring may be more pronounced when contrasting against majority or more disliked outgroups. In fact, this projection rate was correlated with self-reported intergroup bias in studies 2 and 3 and social identification in all three studies, reflecting that the extent to which individuals generalize about their groups based on themselves may depend on how biased and affectively attached they are to their social groups. Findings reflect that how people generalize from the self to the group may enact similarity-based classification processes that are amplified under particular intergroup contexts.