The Big Two in Social Judgment and Behavior

Abstract

One of the most significant developments in research on social judgment was the realization that the same two fundamental content dimensions underlie judgments of the self, others, social groups, nations, cultures, faces, etc. These two fundamental dimensions are also called the “Big Two.” They denote two “modes of existence” (Bakan, 1966), namely, social relatedness (“communion”; alsocalled warmth, morality, expressiveness, affiliation) and individual strivings (“agency,” also-called competence, instrumentality, power). These “Big Two” have the potential to integrate different lines of research in psychology, and they are also relevant in numerous applied contexts. Most important for research on social information processing, the “Big Two” advance our knowledge on the role that content plays in information processing. This special issue of Social Psychology stems from a conference on the “Big Two” held in Erlangen, Germany, in 2010, and it continues a special issue of the European Journal of Social Psychology that was also devoted to the fundamental dimensions of social judgment (guest editors: Andrea E. Abele, Amy Cuddy, Charles Judd, and Vincent Yzerbyt). Our call for papers to the present special issue resulted in 26 submissions – and it proved very difficult to select only those 12 papers that seemed best suited for the present volume and could finally be accepted in October/ November 2012. Bruckmuller and Abele study the representation of agency and communion terms and show that negative terms related to the communion dimension are more densely clustered than both positive communion items and agency items in general. Radkiewicz, Skarzynska, and Hamer show that general opinions about people’s communion and agency are strongly related to how negativistic worldviews are, with the latter being most negative among respondents who think that people are highly agentic but low in communion/morality. The two papers by Abele and Brack as well as Wojciszke and Sobiczewska are concerned with a theoretical model assuming actor/observer differences in the “profitability” of agentic and communal traits, that is, that agentic traits are mainly profitable for the trait possessor (actor), while communal traits are profitable for the surrounding others (observers; see Peeters, 1992). Abele and Brack show that the communal trait of “trustworthiness” is of special importance when interacting with another person, and that the valuation of others’ agentic traits varies with the kind of relationship. Wojciszke and Sobiczewska show that self-evaluations are dominated by agentic content, whereas other evaluations rely on both kinds of content. Bi, Ybarra, and Zhao show that this agency-dominated perspective on self-esteem also holds in the cultural context of China. Moreover, these authors combine the agency/communion perspective with the perspective of genderstereotypic traits. Gender-stereotypic traits are also the focus of De Lemus, Spear, Bukowski, Moya, and Lupianez, who demonstrate a somewhat counterintuitive effect that women exposed to traditional gender roles activate stereotype-inconsistent traits faster than stereotype-consistent ones. Bertolotti, Catellani, Douglas, and Sutton show how defensive communication (involving downward and upward counterfactuals) influences the perception of politicians’ agency and morality, and how this influence is moderated by the participants’ level of political sophistication. Siman Tov-Nachlieli, Schnabel, and Nadler show that, following transgressions, victimized groups or individuals experience threats to their agency (and attempt to restore this facet of their identity), while perpetrating groups or individuals experience threats to their communion (and are motivated to restore this aspect of their identity). Cislak extends the Big Two to power relations showing that high power increases interest in and preference for agentic virtues in others which is mediated by increases in a task (versus relationships) orientation. The final three papers connect the Big Two with embodied information processing. In a series of experiments, Schubert, Schubert, and Topolinski show that spatial elevation can both increase and decrease respect (an agency-based attitudinal response) depending on whether the elevation is substantiated by the elevated person’s achievement or not. Building on previous findings that physical warmth induces prosociality, IJzerman, Karremans, Thomsen, and Schubert show that children with a secure attachment to their friends tend to be more generous