People who were told to think of positive traits (as opposed to negative traits) judged the two individuals to be more similar to each other. 

Alma College

This experiment asked people to indicate 2 people that they know personally (did not have to be exclusively liked or disliked). They were then asked to identify either as many positive or negative traits as they could about each one. Afterwards, they were asked how similar they were to one another.  

Experiment 7; My Friends Are All Alike

Alves, H., Koch, A., & Unkelbach, C. (2016). My friends are all alike—the relation between liking and perceived similarity in person perception. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 62, 103-117.

My Friends Are All Alike

Predicted that those who focused on thinking of positive traits would generate a larger number of shared traits for both people; thus, making them view them as being more similar to each other. Secondly, they thought there would be a greater overlap of shared positive traits across all participants.

Hypotheses for Study 7 (Alves et al., 2016)

Exp. 7 Results: Similarity (Alves et al., 2016)

There was more shared traits among people in the positive term condition than the negative; that is, people used more of the same traits to describe people positively. 

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