The emergence of egocentric biases when comparing others is independent of whether groups or individuals are being compared

Abstract Flexible social comparisons require transforming information across reference frames, a process thought to depend on map-like computations in the hippocampal formation. Previous work has shown that egocentric social biases—an implicit reliance on self-knowledge—emerge when relative attributes of others are integrated into absolute social reference frames. However, it remains unclear whether this bias depends on the comparison being made in a specific reference frame (absolute vs relative), or on the type of social agent involved (individuals vs groups). Across two behavioural experiments, we employed a social coordinate transformation task where participants learned a stranger's preferences relative to either an individual or a group (relative frame) and then made inferences within an absolute reference frame defined by the alternative entity type. Across both experiments, egocentric anchoring-and-adjustment was observed during rating, and accuracy correlated with a map-like distance metric in the absolute reference frame. Crucially, self-preferences biased performance across all configurations despite being task-irrelevant. A formal model comparison revealed that the discrepancy between the self and the stranger was the primary predictor of performance, outperforming models based on absolute or relative frame discrepancies alone. These findings indicate that egocentric anchoring is a fundamental feature of flexible social comparisons regardless of social entity.