Even Without Reason, People Judge Strangers Based On Their Own Tastes

Sizing Up a Stranger Often Starts With Self-Comparison, Study Finds

Guessing whether a total stranger likes spicy food or would rather cycle to work, the mind reaches for a handy yardstick: itself. A new study from Universitat Jaume I in Spain, involving 118 participants across two experiments, found that people measure strangers against their own habits and tastes, even though the task never required them to consult their own preferences. The pull showed up in both experiments.

Earlier work had shown that people use their own preferences as a mental starting point when guessing what others like, a pattern called egocentric anchoring. Researchers Marta Rodríguez Aramendía and Raphael Kaplan, who published their results in Royal Society Open Science, wanted to know whether that tendency depends on who is being compared: single individuals or whole groups, such as city dwellers or village dwellers.

That pull left a small but measurable mark on scores. Participants answered correctly more often when a stranger’s likely tastes sat far from their own and made more mistakes when the two were close. A coffee lover sizing up someone who probably never touches the stuff, in everyday terms, had an easier job than one sizing up a fellow fan.

Judging Strangers From One Clue Required Some Mental Math

Both experiments took place at that university. In the first, 98 people signed up and 73 remained after 25 were dropped for not finishing the task or scoring below 60% accuracy. Fifty were women, and the average age was about 21. In the second, 45 of 56 remained after 11 were dropped for the same reasons. Twenty-nine were women, and the average age was about 23. All 118 were analyzed together. Participants were compensated and gave written consent.

Each participant first rated how likely they were to do more than 100 everyday activities, such as eating spicy food, reading a book or cycling to work, on a scale from 0 to 10, and 75 of those activities were kept for the rest of the study. Participants then read short descriptions of two fictional people and two groups, city dwellers and village dwellers, and rated how likely each would be to do the same activities.

Then came the guessing game, repeated for 240 trials, with a maximum of 10 seconds per answer. Participants learned that a mystery stranger engaged in an activity “more” or “less” than one of the familiar people or groups. Using that clue and a simple rule for adjusting the familiar rating, they worked out the stranger’s likely preference. Next, they picked which of two options the stranger was closer to, one of them always a neutral midpoint rating of 5.

Swapping roles between the experiments let researchers separate two possibilities: that the bias comes from the mental translation itself, or from the kind of target being judged, an individual or a group. In the first, participants compared the stranger to an individual, then chose between options drawn from the groups. In the second, a group supplied the clue and individuals supplied the options.

Slower Ratings Came With Larger Gaps From Participants’ Own Tastes

A first sign of anchoring came while participants rated the two fictional people and two groups. The longer someone took on a rating, the further it landed from their own answer, a pattern consistent with starting at a personal reference point and then stepping away from it. A spicy-food fan asked about someone else, for instance, might begin at a personal 9 and then talk themselves down to a 6. Participants also viewed city and village dwellers as more different from themselves than the two fictional individuals. Accuracy in the guessing game rose with larger distances between the stranger’s estimated rating and the two options, in both experiments, and overall scores and speed were similar across the two setups.

Judging Strangers Leaned Hardest on Personal Tastes

Researchers next checked where participants’ own ratings crept in despite never being needed. Three suspects were weighed: the person or group that supplied the clue, the people or groups that supplied the answer options, and the stranger. The stranger won. How far a participant’s own rating sat from the stranger’s estimated rating predicted accuracy better than either of the other two measures, and better than all three combined.

Rodríguez Aramendía and Kaplan offer one explanation: a stranger is the least familiar figure in the setup, and anchoring helps reduce uncertainty, so minds lean hardest on the self when other information runs thin. A person on the next barstool offers even less to go on than any character in this study, which may explain why first guesses about strangers so often sound like the guesser.

First impressions of a new coworker or a neighbor are worth treating as guesses shaped partly by the guesser. A lab puzzle built to make the guesser’s own tastes irrelevant still could not keep them out.

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Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute medical, psychological, or professional advice. It summarizes a single study, and its findings should not be treated as definitive. Anyone with concerns about their own mental health should consult a qualified professional.

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