In social psychology large amounts of empirical evidence indicate that similarity breeds liking this is known as the similarity effect. ( May 2016) ( Learn how and when to remove this template message) Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Please help improve this section by adding citations to reliable sources. Larkey & Markman (2005) found some evidence against this view, showing that the number of steps to transform the colors and shapes of geometric objects does not predict people's similarity judgments for those objects. The shorter this minimal program, the more similarity the pair of concepts. For any representation system and set of transformations, it is possible to define the shortest set of steps (i.e., the shortest program) that will transform one representation into another. #Law of similarity psychology series#On this view, any mental representation can be transformed into another mental representation through some series of steps. Transformational accounts of similarity ( Hahn, Chater & Richardson 2003) were developed to evaluate similarity independently of the type of mental representation. Structural approaches to similarity emerged from research on analogy. Thus, the relationship between the commonalities of a pair and the differences is important for understanding people's assessments of similarity. Research suggests that alignable differences have a larger impact on people's judgments of similarity than do nonalignable differences. For example, cars have seatbelts and motorcycles do not. Alignable differences contrast with nonalignable differences which are aspects of one concept that have no correspondence in the other. Because this difference required first finding a commonality between the pair, it is called an alignable difference. However, cars have four wheels, while motorcycles have two wheels. Consider the comparison between a car and a motorcycle. In fact, determining the differences between a pair requires finding the commonalities. However, commonalities and differences are not psychologically independent. In particular, featural approaches assume that the commonalities and differences are independent of each other. Structural approaches to similarity ( Gentner & Markman 1997) were developed to address limitations of the featural account. It is possible to account for people's intuitions or ratings of the similarities between concepts by assuming that judgments of similarity increase with the number of commonalities (weighted by the salience of those commonalities) and decreases with the number of differences (weighted by the salience of the differences). Features that are shared in the feature lists are commonalities of the pair and features that are contained in one feature set but not the other are differences of the pair. A similarity comparison involves comparing the feature lists that represent the concepts. Saying "That surgeon is a butcher" means something quite different from saying "That butcher is a surgeon."įeatural approaches assumed that people represent concepts by lists of features that describe properties of the items. Furthermore, many metaphors are also directional. For example, it feels more natural to say that 101 is like 100 than to say that 100 is like 101. For example, we often prefer to state similarity in one direction. However, psychological similarity is not symmetric. The distance between two points is the same regardless of which point you start from. A strength of this approach is there are many mathematical techniques for deriving spaces from data such as multidimensional scaling ( Shepard 1962) and latent semantic analysis ( Landauer & Dumais 1997).įeatural approaches ( Tversky 1977) were developed to address limitations of the mental distance approaches. Concepts represented by points that are near to each other are more psychologically similar than are points that are conceptually distant. Similarity between concepts is a function of the distance between the concepts in space. Concepts are represented as points within the space. Mental distance approaches ( Shepard 1962) assume that mental representations can be conceptualized as some kind of mental space. Cognitive psychological approaches Mental distance approaches
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