Reference Groups as Anchors in Judgments of other Groups: A Biasing Factor in “Rating Tasks”?

Abstract

A phenomenon which might bias rating tasks (the reference group as an anchor phenomenon) was explored by having 144 male undergraduate members of Greek, eating club, and independent organizations, and students belonging to none of these organizations rank 28 campus organizations in terms of relative prestige. In general, members of groups consistently overestimated the prestige of their own (assimilation effect), under-estimated the prestige of organizations dissimilar to their own (contrast effect), and had more pronounced assimilation and contrast effects than did subjects not belonging to the rated organizations. Moreover, members of groups placed a greater number of organizations dissimilar to their own into objectionable categories. These results suggest that it might be extremely difficult for highly ego-involved persons to maintain an appropriate judgmental set in such tasks when the ratings are made on the basis of the quality, prestige, and other such ill-defined criteria. Over-all, the results strongly supported predictions made from social judgment theory.