People often incorporate the opinions of others to make
predictions about the world, including their preferences for
novel experiences and items. In two experiments, we explored
how people use the opinions of dissimilar others in making
such predictions. While social cognition research has found
that similar others tend to influence our judgments more than
dissimilar others, the diversity principle from category-based
induction argues that we value evidence from diverse sources.
Our results suggest that people seek and use information from
dissimilar others differently when predicting their own
preferences than when making predictions with more
verifiable values. For self-relevant predictions, participants
were less likely to seek the opinion of dissimilar advisors
(Experiment 1) and more likely to contrast their judgments
away from these advisors’ opinions (Experiment 2).