You want to appear competent? Be mean! You want to appear sociable? Be lazy! Group differentiation and the compensation effect

Abstract

Using the two fundamental dimensions of social judgment, warmth and competence, we show that, contrary to general models of impression formation, negative information on one dimension has positive consequences on the way a target is judged on the other dimension. Participants learned about two groups which were either congruent on warmth and competence (one group high on both and the other low on both) or they were compensatory (one group high on warmth and low on competence, the other high on competence and low on warmth). Our results show that in the compensatory condition, the groups were rated more extremely than in the congruent condition and that this was especially the case for the dimension on which the groups were high. Results are discussed both in terms of how they run counter to traditional theories of impression formation and what they tell us about the fundamental dimensions of social judgment.