Of Nice and Mean: The Personal Relevance of Others’ Competence Drives Perceptions of Warmth

Abstract

Past research shows that when forming an impression of an interdependent person, perceivers are motivated to look for information relevant to their goals and interests. The present experiments examined what happens after this information-seeking stage and showed that the relevance of the target’s attributes for one’s goals and interests drives warmth impressions. Using both a scenario (Experiment 1) and realistic methodologies (Experiment 3), we showed that when the perceiver had to collaborate with a target, the more competent the target, the more perceivers anticipated success and the more the target came across as warm. By contrast, in a competition setting, the competence of the target negatively affected prospects of success and impressions of warmth. Experiment 2 further showed that the target’s competence drove warmth impressions only when perceivers attached a great value to the success of the task, suggesting that these inferences have a motivational underpinning.

Warmth is more influential than competence: an fMRI repetition suppression study

“…This is also contradicts very recent behavioral findings (Carrier, Dompnier & Yzerbyt, . This is also contradicts very recent behavioral findings (Carrier, Dompnier & Yzerbyt, 2019), showing that the personal relevance of others' competence drives impressions of warmth. In the current study, the information about competence was demonstrated to be either high or low.…”

Good to Bad or Bad to Bad? What is the relationship between valence and the trait content of the Big Two?

“…Thus, although we consistently found a positive linear relationship between competence and valence, it is conceivable that a curvilinear or even negative relationship may emerge under different circumstances. For instance, in a competitive environment, highly intelligent individuals may be perceived as “bad” (e.g., Carrier, Dompnier, & Yzerbyt, ). Further studies may clarify how changes in the meaning of a trait modulate its perceived valence across different contexts.…”

On Attenuated Interactions, Measurement Error, and Statistical Power: Guidelines for Social and Personality Psychologists

“…Of the nine papers exclusively reporting studies with sample sizes less than 781, seven calculated a priori power analyses. Of these, four studies estimated power based on effect sizes calculated on a small pilot study ( r = .26; Wang & Ackerman, 2019), or effect sizes that were presumed to be medium to large ( r = .32; Carrier et al, 2019), medium ( r = .25; Yao & Chao, 2019), or small to medium ( r = .24; Martin et al, 2019). As these assumed interaction effect sizes imply true simple effects in an effect-present condition that is double the assumed interaction effect size (i.e., r = .40–.64), the hypothesized interaction effect sizes were overly optimistic.…”