Liking and respect are proposed as two dimensions of interpersonal attitudes. Whereas liking-disliking reflects personal preferences, respect-disrespect reflects deference. Four studies involving a variety of samples and target persons showed that: (1) liking is more strongly influenced by communal than agentic qualities of the target, (2) respect is more strongly influenced by agentic than communal qualities of the target, (3) influence of communal information on liking is mediated by the perceived benevolence of the target, (4) influence of agentic information on respect is mediated by the inferred status potential of the target person. Copyright # 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.Interpersonal attitudes are usually conceived of as unitary entities and are virtually equated with liking or global evaluation of another person. However, a substantial amount of theorizing and a number of empirical results suggest that attitudes in general may be ambivalent (Jonas, Brömer, & Diehl, 2000;Thompson, Zanna, & Griffin, 1995) and the same could be true for interpersonal attitudes, implying their distinct facets, with various antecedents and diverging consequences for psychological processes and behavior. On the other hand, there is a large amount of evidence that person perceptions involve two distinct content dimensions which also suggests a possible bi-dimensionality on the side of more affective, attitudinal responses to persons.We assume that whereas attraction (affection toward a target person) is the affective component of an interpersonal attitude, person impressions (specific evaluations and trait ascriptions) constitute a cognitive component of the attitude. This assumption is based on the tripartite model discerning between the affective, cognitive, and behavioral attitude components (cf. Eagly & Chaiken, 1993), as well as on empirical research showing cognitive evaluations and affective attraction toward persons to be distinct outcomes which are differently influenced by various factors such as social comparisons (Herbst, Gaertner, & Insko, 2003) or personal threat (Montoya & Horton, 2004). We postulate that the cognitive component of interpersonal attitudes results from person perception processes which involve two basic types of content: agentic and communal, while interpersonal attraction is the affective component of interpersonal attitudes and involves two dimensions of liking and respect. Whereas information on the target's communion influences liking to a higher degree than respect, information on agency influences respect more strongly than liking. We present a series of four studies conducted in various settings to test these hypotheses. DIMENSIONALITY OF SOCIAL PERCEPTION: AGENCY AND COMMUNIONSocial judgments concerning persons, self-construal, and social groups involve two basic, relatively independent dimensions of content which have been variously defined, like agentic versus communal qualities (Bakan, 1966; Helgeson, European Journal of Social Psychology Eur. J. Soc. Psychol. 39, 973-990 (20...

We present a Double Perspective Model (DPM) explaining why agency (competence) and communion (warmth) constitute two basic content dimensions of social cognition. Every social action involves two perspectives: of the agent (a person who performs an action) and of the recipient (a person at whom the action is directed). Immediate cognitive goals of the agent and recipient differ, which results in heightened accessibility and weight of content referring either to agency (from the agent's perspective) or to communion (from the recipient's perspective). DPM explains why evaluations of other persons are dominated by communal over agentic considerations and allows a novel hypothesis that self-esteem is dominated by agentic over communal information. We present several studies supporting this hypothesis. Copyright # 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.In this paper we build on the distinction of agency (competence) and communion (warmth) as the fundamental dimensions of social cognition. We present a Double Perspective Model (DPM) offering a new account of why agency and communion constitute the two basic dimensions. We also present a novel hypothesis resulting from the modelthat self-esteem is dominated by agentic over communal information. We begin by shortly reviewing the idea of agency and communion as basic dimensions of social cognition, then present DPM as an explanation of this duality and discuss two main derivations of our model. First, perceptions and evaluations of other persons are dominated by communal over agentic information. As this is a well-established fact now, we only summarize the confirming empirical evidence. Second, the self-cognition (including self-esteem) is dominated by agentic over communal information. As this is a novel prediction, we discuss it in some detail and present a series of supporting studies. THE DOUBLE PERSPECTIVE MODELThere is an agreement that social cognition involves two basic dimensions of content on the level of both individuals and social groups. This distinction has always been present in social psychology, though under different names, such as masculine-feminine, agentic-communal, task-relation oriented, individualistic-collectivistic, intellectually-socially, good-bad, competence-morality, or competence-warmth (Judd, James-Hawkins, Yzerbyt, & Kashima, 2005). Though these distinctions are not identical, they show a considerable overlap when studied empirically on the level of abstract traitnames frequently used to capture their meaning (Abele & Wojciszke, 2007). All the former terms denote intellectual and motivational competence and focus on efficiency of goalattainment. All the latter terms denote prosocial or antisocial content of the goals and concern about social relations. After Bakan (1966), who first theorized on the duality of human existence -on individuals as having separate goals and being parts of social units-we use ''agency'' versus ''communion'' as generic terms capturing the essence of those various distinctions.Agentic and communal contents constitut...

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Although status and wealth are related facets of social stratification, their association is only moderate. In this article, we demonstrate that justification of wealth versus status can be independent processes. To this end, we introduce a novel, nondeclarative measure of system justification. The measure is based on within-individual correlations between the judgments of how a group ''is doing'' and how it ''should be doing.'' Two studies demonstrated that the between-group differentiation in terms of material wealth was delegitimized-the more a group was perceived as wealthy, the less it was desired to be wealthy. However, the between-group differentiation in terms of status was generally legitimized-the more a group was perceived as influential, the more it was desired to be influential. We conclude by discussing the role of sociopolitical context in active legitimization and delegitimization of different aspects of the system.