No, a the closest thing we have to a soft reset is turning the phone on and off via the power button. A hard reset is forcing the phone off without giving it a chance to shutdown properly (eg. Battery pull). There is no known soft reset right now for the droid 3. Although a few patches ago there was a random reboot issue that was actually soft resetting the phone at random intervals (system uptime still continuing).
Edit: after looking around for it I've noticed that many many MANY other people have this same misconception and also think that a hard reset is restoring to factory defaults. These phones are like mini-computers and use the same terminology. A hard reboot on a computer is when you hold the power button or yank the power cord out because you either had no time to soft reboot(warm boot, soft reset, god so many different terms for how the computer started up) or the computer wasn't responding. A softboot is when you click the restart/press the power button once(if configured to do so).
Restoring to factory defaults is just that... factory restore. Where all of this restoring = hard reset non-sense came from I have no idea.
Edit 2: since Android is linux based there's another soft reset ability that is basically everything except the kernal restarts(thus the system uptime continuing like in my example above).
-Saik0