Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

How do we represent other people? Our representations are prone to a wide range of biases. We project our mental states onto others (especially when we assume they are similar to us), or rely on existing stereotypes (when we think they are different). But sometimes, it can be unclear how similar or different a person actually is from us. How does this affect how we represent their preferences? Here, subjects declared their favorite and least favorite colors and were introduced to another person whose preferences were neither completely similar or dissimilar. Across experiments, people successfully remembered the other person’s preferences, but they also tended to falsely ascribe their own lower ranked preferences to the other player in multiple memory and decision-making tasks. These results suggest a tendency to distance ourselves from preferences we identify with the least in our hierarchy of preferences, and to associate them instead with the ''other''.