Women assimilate across gender, men don't: The role of gender to the own-anchor effect in age, height, and weight estimates

摘要

This paper reports 2 studies of the own-anchor effect (i.e., assimilation in age, height, and weight estimates) in same- and cross-gender age, height, and weight estimates. The own-anchor effect is believed to be stronger for same-gender estimates, but the investigation reported here is the first to test this hypothesis with participants and target persons of both genders. Several own-anchor effects were found in females' same- and cross-gender estimates, whereas males only showed own-anchor effects in same-gender estimates. These results lean toward the possibility that women assimilate across gender, whereas men do not. Explanations of these results with reference to Krueger's (Krueger & Zeiger, 1993; Robbins & Krueger, 2005) theory of social projection and the consequences for witness reliability are discussed.