Similarity and Agreement in Self- and Other Perception: A Meta-Analysis

The authors examined the consistency of person perception in two domains: agreement (i.e., do two raters of the same person agree?) and similarity (i.e., does a perceiver view two persons as similar to one another?). In each domain, they compared self-judgments with judgments not involving the self (i.e., self-other agreement vs. consensus, in the case of agreement, and assumed similarity vs. assimilation, in the case of similarity). In a meta-analysis of 24 studies, they examined the effects of several moderating variables on each type of judgment. In general, moderators exerted similar effects irrespective of whether judgments of the self were involved. Group size did have stronger effects on self-other agreement and assumed similarity than on consensus and assimilation. The authors also present evidence that new measures of assumed similarity and self-other agreement using the Social Relations Model seem to be relatively independent of the moderators. Keywords person perception, self/identity, individual differences The fields of social and personality psychology have long been fascinated with the basic question in person perception: Is the process of self-perception fundamentally different from the process of other perception? To date, there has been much theoretical advancement in understanding the ways in which our self- and other perceptions relate. Researchers typically focus on specific questions that relate self- to other perception. For example, following Taylor and Brown (1988), the phenomenon of self-enhancement, at least in Western cultures, is well replicated. People see themselves more posi-tively than they see others (i.e., Festinger’s, 1954, social comparison theory), more positively than they are seen by others (i.e., Allport’s, 1937, notion of self-insight), and more positively than they see others and are seen by others (Kwan