Moral character predominates in person perception and evaluation.

Abstract

What sorts of trait information do people most care about when forming impressions of others? Recent research in social cognition suggests that "warmth," broadly construed, should be of prime importance in impression formation. Yet, some prior research suggests that information about others' specifically moral traits--their moral "character"--may be a primary dimension. Although warmth and character have sometimes been conceived of as interchangeable, we argue that they are separable, and that across a wide variety of contexts, character is usually more important than warmth in impression formation. We first showed that moral character and social warmth traits are indeed separable (Studies 1 and 2). Further studies that used correlational and experimental methods showed that, as predicted, in most contexts, moral character information is more important in impression formation than is warmth information (Studies 2-6). Character information was also more important than warmth information with respect to judgments of traits' perceived fundamentalness to identity, their uniquely human quality, their context-independence, and their controllability (Study 2). Finally, Study 7 used an archival method to show that moral character information appears more prominently than warmth information in obituaries, and more strongly determines the impressions people form of the individuals described in those obituaries. We discuss implications for current theories of person perception and social cognition.

A tripartite taxonomy of character: Evidence for intrapersonal, interpersonal, and intellectual competencies in children

“…For example, the predictive validity of self-control rivals IQ and family socioeconomic status in predicting academic performance in adolescence, as well as health, wealth, and civic behavior in adulthood (Duckworth & Seligman, 2005; Moffitt et al, 2011). Moreover, character is arguably the most important determinant of the overall impressions people form of others (Brambilla & Leach, 2014; Goodwin, Piazza, & Rozin, 2014; Wojciszke, Bazinska, & Jaworska, 1998). …”

Investigating stereotype structure with empirical network models

“…In this vein, although the importance of morality has been highlighted in the impression formation processes (Brambilla et al, 2012;Goodwin, 2015;Goodwin et al, 2014), these results provide empirical evidence for the influence of sociability-related content features. For practical purposes, it could be said that if any member of these groups is perceived as (un)likeable it will affect the other group features.…”

“…Essentially, the assorted co-occurrence of features of different dimensions should be assumed as a natural consequence of social categorization. Since empirical network models do not require to constraint the features to belong to an exclusive substructure, they capture the real structure of group features and can provide insight into the overlap between different contents (e.g., kind is moral and sociable, whereas honest is exclusively moral; Goodwin et al, 2014). However, the SCM (e.g., Cuddy et al, 2009;Fiske et al, 1999Fiske et al, , 2002, and its derived models (e.g., Brambilla et al, 2011Brambilla et al, , 2012Brambilla et al, , 2013, are based on the existence of two (or three) underlying dimensions along which the most common traits for describing people have to be distributed (i.e., structured): competence and warmth (competence, morality, and sociability).…”

Trust Perception

“…Perceptions of trustworthiness are highly related to evaluations of morality (Brambilla, Rusconi, Sacchi, & Cherubini, 2011;Cottrell, Neuberg, & Li, 2007;Goodwin, Piazza, & Rozin, 2014;Leach, Ellemers, & Barreto, 2007), a process investigated by a separate but related area of neuroimaging research. Typically, in these studies, participants learn about the moral character of other individuals through brief, textual descriptions of their behavior.…”