When it comes to the similar-to-me effect, this prototype is often our perception of ourselves. In the 1970s, Two of the founding fathers of behavioral science, Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky made one of the biggest contributions to our ideas about stereotypes, with their discovery of the representative heuristic. It showed that we tend to compare people to an existing mental prototype. We tend to make assumptions about wider personality traits based on our own preconceived ideas about what someone from a similar group might be like. Stereotypes are another reason behind the similar-to-me effect, which is especially prevalent when it comes to liking people that look similar to us. Social identity theory explains why we group people into ‘them’ and ‘us’ categories, which can lead to differential treatment. Those people that we use to construct our sense of self become our ‘in’ group and we tend to align ourselves to these people.
Social identity theory states that we show favoritism towards people that are similar to us because similar people help us construct our own sense of self. Later, Polish social psychologist Henri Tajfel developed social identity theory, which suggests that people’s sense of self is strongly formed by their group memberships. Ethnocentrism and in-group bias were posited as reasons behind atrocious treatment of otherness, as evidenced during World War II and the Holocaust. He believed ethnocentrism, a belief that our own culture is superior to others, was the root of in-group bias. However, it only established its academic roots in 1906, when political scientist William Sumner first identified that we tend to treat people that we identify as part of our in-group better than people that are outside our group. Our tendency to favor those similar to us is the basis of multiple cognitive biases which have likely shaped much of human interaction throughout history.
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