Explaining the relationship between Agency and Communion by means of Lay Personality Theories and Connectionist Modelling

Abstract

The relationship between the "Big Two" dimensions of social perception – Agency, and Communion – is a topic of ongoing debate. In some studies, these dimensions seem to be independent, while in others, they are positively, negatively, or curvilinearly related. In the current paper, we aimed to explain these seemingly contradictory findings through a model of individual differences in the cognitive representations of the Big Two, i.e., lay personality theories of Agency and Communion. We represent the relationship between these two dimensions as an associative network and apply connectionist modeling to simulate impression formation processes. In two simulation studies, we recreated all four types of relationships between Communion and Agency found in the literature. In an experimental study, we proved the model’s predictive validity.