Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Shared preferences are a critical component of social attrac-tion. Knowing that someone likes the same things as you do isindicative of broader underlying similarities that support suc-cessful social partnerships. However, not all overlaps in prefer-ences are equally informative. Here we propose that the rarityof overlaps in preferences may be a particularly salient cue forsocial affiliation. We find evidence that people are sensitiveto the rarity of overlaps in preferences and affiliate themselves(Experiment 1) or predict others’ affiliations (Experiment 2)with potential social partners who share a relatively rare pref-erence. Because preferences provide information about bothwhat people know and what they like, we also tested the ef-fect of overlaps in knowledge (without taste) and overlaps intaste (without knowledge) to understand why we are drawn topeople who share our preferences.