PERSONALITY AND SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY BULLETIN Hodges et al. / FEATURE MATCHING IN SELF-OTHER COMPARISONS It’s Different When I Do It: Feature Matching in Self-Other Comparisons

Two studies explored the application of feature-matching and cancellation models to self-other comparisons. College partici-pants completed a questionnaire about their religious behaviors and saw another questionnaire supposedly completed by another student. Participants in Study 1 (N = 114) who were explicitly provided direction of comparison instructions showed a direc-tion of comparison effect, rating the person whose questionnaire they saw last as more religious. Participants in Study 2 (N = 103), who were not given explicit direction of comparison instructions, did not. Most important, in both studies, the extent to which self and other overlapped on shared features affected self-and other judgments asymmetrically. Participants appeared to cancel out behaviors shared by the self and other when rating the other person (i.e., they gave lower ratings when there was more overlap) but not when rating themselves