Lay Psychology and the Social Value of Persons

Abstract

Personality traits are basic constructs of lay psychology. Unlike the traditional view in which traits are considered as descriptive tools, we argue that the most frequent traits are evaluative criteria, that is, they do not point out what people are, but what people are socially worth. First, we intend to report on various studies showing that traits can be viewed as generalizations of affordances in social relations: traits supply information not only on what people are doing, but also, and several times more, on what is possible to do with people. Second, we challenge the dominant view underlying social judgments by showing that the two traditional factors can be viewed as aspects of the social value of persons. We called them social desirability and social utility. We shall show that the two dimensions intervene in situations in which social value of the person is engaged. To finish, we shall address the link between these dimensions with some aspects of individualism.• Affective evaluation. The evaluation may be said to pertain to a somewhat 'primary' affectivity in one's connection to objects, as for instance in the replications of Osgood, Suci, and Tannenbaum's (1957) famous semantic mediation theory of meaning. In this Social and Personality Psychology Compass 3/6 (2009):

The bigger one of the “Big Two”? Preferential processing of communal information

“…In addition to being a classification of content, the dimensions of communion and agency can also be distinguished with respect to the social value they have, i.e., their "profitability" for other people interacting with the target vs. their profitability for the trait possessor him-/herself (Abele & Wojciszke, 2007;Peeters, 2001Peeters, , 2008Peeters & Czapinski, 1990; see also Beauvois & Dubois, 2009). Communal traits tend to be other-profitable because they inform the perceiver about attributes of the target that first and foremost have (positive or negative) consequences for other people interacting with the target.…”

The Social Value of Persons: Theory and Applications

“…It has been shown that "worthful people" make normative judgments (see Dubois, 2003 andDubois, 2009 for the concept of social judgment norms). For example, "worthful people" have been found to be more internal, more self-sufficient and more optimistic than others.…”

“…or what one can make them do (Can I persuade this pupil to embark on a lengthy course of study?). In other words, it allows them to evaluate the objects (Beauvois & Dubois, 2000, 2009. Thus, instead of being "objects of knowledge", objects are actually "objects of evaluation" to people.…”

“…The purpose of this chapter is to outline a set of theoretical formulations and some studies that rely on an evaluative conception of intuitive psychology (Beauvois, 1976(Beauvois, , 2011Beauvois & Dubois, 2000, 2009Dubois, 2006;Dubois & Beauvois, 2011) and, more specifically, of the intuitive psychology of personality traits. While this conception differs from most current theories, it can be likened to the formulations of researchers who differentiate between a paradigmatic manner of thinking and a narrative one (Zuckier, 1986).…”

“…In the following three sections, we discuss a variety of empirical studies whose findings provide strong support for the evaluative approach in psychological description (for a more comprehensive review, see Beauvois & Dubois, 2000, 2009 …”