Who Likes What? Comparing Personal Preferences with Group Predictions based on Gender and Extraversion Across Common Semantic Domains.

Some people like coffee while others prefer tea, but little is known about whether preferences like these are shared among groups and whether they vary systematically across many common semantic categories. This study addresses this gap by examining two major sources of variation -- gender and extraversion -- across twelve categories or domains, ranging from fruit and animals to sports and personal qualities. In Study 1, participants rated their own preferences for a set of 300 exemplars. Results showed significant preference differences between men and women for 40% of items spread across all categories, and smaller but reliable differences between introverts and extraverts for 11% of items concentrated in domains like personal qualities. Study 2 used an allocentric categorisation task where the same participants categorised items based on which they thought would be preferred by men vs women or introverts vs extraverts. Using the ratings from Study 1 to score accuracy, the judgments from Study 2 showed that participants were sensitive to even subtle differences in preference, although accuracy varied by the judge's gender and extraversion: women were more accurate than men across many categories and introverts more accurate than extraverts for a few categories. We also found incorrect but widely shared judgments for about 20% of items, suggestive of inaccurate stereotypes about group preferences. Together, these results suggest widespread and systematic variation by gender (and to a lesser extent extraversion) that can be accurately predicted by others, although with systematic biases. Our results have implications for theories of semantic representation and social cognition.