This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Researchers already know that humans have a tendency to use egocentric anchoring—a cognitive bias in which people use their own preferences, beliefs and perspectives as a mental starting point (or anchor) to understand or predict what another person thinks, feels or prefers. This is not necessarily a sign of selfishness or self-importance, but a way for us to better understand others.
A new study, published in Royal Society Open Science, suggests that this tendency to start from our own preferences persists when both individuals and groups act as comparison points. Surprisingly, participants were more accurate in their judgments when a stranger's inferred preferences differed more from their own. Using self-preferences can help the mind create a kind of social map, similar in function to a geographical map.
In this analogy, people use their own preferences as a starting point to understand their relationship to others, then adjust away from that starting point. For example, someone may enjoy a particular activity more than one person but less than another, putting the two people on opposite sides of the self in the social map. Distance from the self on the social map then relates to similarity, where more similar preferences rank as "closer." Further information, in the form of other people's opinions, can act as additional data points or "landmarks" on the map.
These act as allocentric frames of reference, independent of the self-centered frame of reference. When combined, the two frames make a more detailed map or an absolute reference frame. In the social context, an example might be one person liking swimming less than you do and more than another person does.
The knowledge of all points on the map allows the person to see a more complete picture. The authors of the new study write, "In the spatial domain, egocentric reference frames encode locations relative to the observer, whereas allocentric frames represent spatial relations relative to external landmarks. Successful navigation requires flexibly combining these frames, a process supported by path integration mechanisms that estimate one's position by accumulating distance and direction from a known starting point.
"Extensive research has shown that specific subregions of the hippocampal formation integrate egocentric and allocentric information during such computations. By contrast, whether and how multiple social reference frames are integrated—beyond simple self–other comparisons—is less explored." To better understand the susceptibility of different reference frames to egocentric biases and how bias affects accuracy, the researchers conducted two behavioral experiments with 118 participants. In the experiments, participants rated everyday preferences for themselves, two fictional people and two groups: city and rural dwellers.
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