Morality and competence in person- and self-perception

Abstract

Morality and competence are posited to constitute two basic kinds of content in person-and self-perception. Moral content dominates person-perception because it typically has a direct and unconditional bearing on the well-being of other people surrounding the person who is described by the trait (including the perceiver). Competence dominates self-perception because it has a direct bearing on the well-being of the perceiver. A comprehensive research programme is reviewed showing that morality of others matters to the perceiver to a much higher degree than his/her competence. When forming global evaluations of others, the perceiver is more interested in their moral than competence qualities, construes their behaviour in moral terms, and his or her impressions and emotional responses are more strongly based on morality than competence considerations. Just the opposite is true for selfperception and self-attitudes. Own behaviours are construed more readily in competence than moral terms, and own competence influences self-evaluations and emotional responses to a higher degree than own morality.Person-perception and self-perception processes are strongly saturated with evaluations and other affective processes. Evaluative responses are ubiquitous, primary, and partially independent of access to stimuli descriptive meaning. Frequently, these responses are also effortless, unconscious, very fast, unintentional, and automatically related to behavioural tendencies (cf. Bargh, 1997;Dijksterhuis & Bargh, 2001;Zajonc, 2000). Most probably, the ubiquity and prominence of evaluation is a consequence of the basic function of social cognition-discerning between beneficial and harmful social objects or environments in the service of approach vs avoidance behaviour. All organisms have at least one mechanism for differentiating agreeable from (Caccioppo, Gardner, & Berntson, 1997) and global impressions of others. Social information processing is, of course, highly flexible and depends on the perceiver's current goals. Nevertheless, the approach -avoidance dimension looms in every nook and cranny searched by modern social cognition students, and ''evaluation is a pervasive and dominant response for most people across the many situations and objects they encounter'' (Jarvis & Petty, 1996, p. 173).Using the computer metaphor of mind, one may say that forming global evaluative impressions serves as a default option in the person-perception process. Evaluative impressions of encountered persons are routinely formed, apparently without effort and specific purposes. Evaluation may be based on various criteria (depending on the perceiver's specific goals) but the basic and most frequently used is probably the criterion of self-interest broadly defined as preserving the perceiver's immediate well-being. If so, evaluation should be strongly underlain by concepts instrumental in locating others (target persons) on the approach -avoidance dimension. Peeters (1992) called such concepts other-profitable traits, i.e., traits that have a direc...

Is it better to be moral than smart? The effects of morality and competence norms on the decision to work at group status improvement.

“…In line with its importance to the individual self, morality appears to play a crucial role in regulating group-level behavior. This may be part of the reason why individuals care so much about the morality of their in-groups and gain positive self-evaluation from it (Leach et al, 2007 Sometimes morality and sociability are combined into a single broader construct relevant to social interactions, which is contrasted with competence (see Wojciszke, 2005;Wojciszke, Bazinska, Jaworski, 1998).…”

Forming Impressions of Personality

“…Although ''Forming Impressions of Personality'' has been regarded as a first demonstration of the primacyof-warmth effect (e.g., Abele & Bruckmüller, 2011;Abele & Wojciszke, 2007;Cuddy, Fiske, & Glick, 2008;Judd, James-Hawkins, Yzerbyt, & Kashima, 2005;Kervyn, Yzerbyt, & Judd, 2010;Richetin, Durante, Mari, Perugini, & Volpato, 2012;Vonk, 1994), it is unclear whether Asch's 1 original studies provide replicable evidence for the effect. Many studies suggest that warmth plays an important role in impression formation (for a review, see Fiske et al, 2007;Wojciszke, 2005), but we wonder if Asch has befittingly been cited as the progenitor of this effect. We believe that Asch's Gestalt theory, if anything, addresses the limitations and boundary conditions of primacy-of-warmth, and we wonder if his data provide any evidence for the effect itself.…”

“…Asch's seminal research on ''Forming Impressions of Personality'' (1946) has widely been cited as providing evidence for a primacy-of-warmth effect, suggesting that warmth-related judgments have a stronger influence on impressions of personality than competencerelated judgments (e.g., Fiske, Cuddy, & Glick, 2007;Wojciszke, 2005). Because this effect does not fit with Asch's Gestalt-view on impression formation and does not readily follow from the data presented in his original paper, the goal of the present study was to critically examine and replicate the studies of Asch's paper that are most relevant to the primacy-of-warmth effect.…”

“…Although there is not one unitary message to be taken from the work (which has been cited over 2,750 times), the message that seems to have most strongly resonated with present-day researchers concerns the primacy-of-warmth effect. Primacy-of-warmth 1 (e.g., Fiske et al, 2007;Wojciszke, 2005) entails that warmth has a primary role in impression formation, in the sense that warmth-related information has a stronger influence on impressions than competence-related information (Wojciszke, Bazinska, & Jaworski, 1998).…”

Crossing the bridge: foreign language students’ reciprocal images in (inter)cultural mediation between Portugal and Turkey

“…Strongly drawing from the categorization model of stereotypes developed under a cognitivist approach (cf. Wojciszke, 2005), this model proposes five distinct categories of images of peoples and cultures: (1) psychological and moral traits; (2) competence-related traits; (3) socio-economic characteristics; (4) visual impact; and (5) linguistic-communicative profiles. Feeling the need to adapt this taxonomy to the results of a preliminary analysis of our data, we proceeded with the following redefinitions:…”