The Primacy of Agency Over Competence in Status Perception

Abstract

A great deal of recent work has found that two fundamental dimensions underlie social judgment. The most common labels used to denote these dimensions are agency versus communion, and competence versus warmth. The present work aimed to disentangle agency understood as the motivation to promote the self from competence understood as ability, and to address their distinctive role in status perception. In Studies 1 and 2, participants were presented with a high- versus low-status target and asked to rate this target on agency, competence and warmth. In Study 3, participants were presented with an agentic, competent, and warm target and asked to rate their social status. Overall, our findings indicated that agency and competence operate as distinct dimensions in social judgment, and that agency is more related to social status than competence.

Facets of the Fundamental Content Dimensions: Agency with Competence and Assertiveness—Communion with Warmth and Morality

“…The overall findings support the prediction that AA is the best predictor for self-esteem and more strongly related to self-esteem than AC (Barkow, 1980; Carrier et al, 2014; Gebauer et al, 2015). But as predicted, CM is also related to self-esteem.…”

“…AA was also most strongly related to agentic impression management. Given the evidence for the importance of AA in judgments of agency, it is notable that existing theorizing and research in the agency—communion framework has paid little attention to this facet (Carrier et al, 2014; Catellani and Bertolotti, 2014). …”

“…The inspection of items used for assessing the “A” dimension also point to this distinction (for instance, “energetic,” “active,” “strong,” “ambitious,” “self-confident,” “assertive” vs. “intelligent,” “talented,” “effective,” “smart”). First empirical evidence comes from research by Carrier et al (2014) who distinguished between assertiveness and competence and found that the ascription of status was more related to assertiveness than to competence.…”

“…We base this prediction on the reasoning that AA is more strongly related to status than AC (Carrier et al, 2014), and that status, in turn, is positively related to self-esteem (Barkow, 1980; Gebauer et al, 2015). Concerning the C dimension, we predicted that CM should be associated with self-esteem, whereas CW should be of minor importance.…”

When Attribution of Consistency Depends on Group Value: Social Valorization of Preference for Consistency in Equivalent and Asymmetric Intergroup Relations

“…The second dimension relies on a person's ability to achieve objectives, succeed in a social system and obtain the most valued positions (Abele & Wojciszke, 2007;Darnon, et al 2009;Dubois & Beauvois, 2001, 2005Testé & Perrin, 2013). Research suggests that this second dimension is associated with high-status groups (Fiske et al, 2002;Fragale, Rosen, Xu, & Merideth, 2009;Oldmeadow & Fiske, 2010), and related to an individual's status (Carrier, Louvet, Chauvin, & Rohmer, 2014;Dubois, 2010).…”