THE DISTINCTIVENESS EFFECT IN SOCIAL CATEGORIZATION - YOU ARE WHAT MAKES YOU UNUSUAL

Three studies tested the hypothesis that people assume that the identi ties of other people ape tied more closely to their distinctive than t o their nondistinctive traits. In Studies 1 and 3, subjects predicted the preferences of a target person who was a member of both a statisti cally distinctive and a statistically nondistinctive category (e.g., s ky diver and tennis player). In Study 2, subjects judged the degree of interpersonal similarity between pairs of people sharing distinctive as opposed to nondistinctive category memberships. Consistent with the hypothesis, subjects linked targets with their more distinctive trait s and assumed targets would be more similar to people who shared their distinctive traits than to people who shared their nondistinctive tra its. The implications of this distinctiveness effect for an understand ing of stereotyping are explored.