Egocentric Pattern Projection

How Implicit Personality Theories Recapitulate the Geography of the Self

Critcher, Clayton R.
Dunning, David

¹Department of Psychology, Cornell University

This research was supported in part by a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship awarded to Clayton R. Critcher and National Institute of Mental Health Grant RO1 56072 and National Science Foundation Grant 0745806 awarded to David Dunning. We thank Kamali Bent, Debbie Chen, Claire Chung, Jill Fleischer, Tom Maher, Linda Mohammadian, and Robert Norback for their assistance with data collection.

Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Clayton R. Critcher, Department of Psychology, Uris Hall, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853-7601. E-mail: [email protected]

Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to David Dunning, Department of Psychology, Uris Hall, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853-7601. E-mail: [email protected]

Received February 3, 2008; Revision received November 14, 2008; Accepted November 21, 2008

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 97(1):p 1-16, July 2009. | DOI: 10.1037/a0015670

Five studies demonstrated egocentric pattern projection, in that the implicit personality theories (IPTs) that participants held about other people tended to recapitulate the terrain of their own personality. To the extent that participants believed they possessed 2 traits to a similar degree within themselves, they tended, through their judgments of others and estimates of population parameters, to claim that the 2 traits were positively correlated in other people; and if they believed they possessed 2 traits to a dissimilar degree within themselves, they tended to claim that the 2 traits were negatively correlated in other people. Further evidence showed that information about the self plays a causal role in the construction of implicit theories, making a unique contribution to the shape of IPTs over and above that of information about another person. The relevance of these data for recent controversies over egocentric social judgment is discussed.