We’ve all heard that people favor their own kind and discriminate against out-groups—but that’s a simplistic view of prejudice, says Amy Cuddy, a professor at Harvard Business School who studies how we judge others. In recent years she and psychologists Susan Fiske of Princeton University and Peter Glick of Lawrence University have developed a powerful new model. All over the world, it turns out, people judge others on two main qualities: warmth (whether they are friendly and well intentioned) and competence (whether they have the ability to deliver on those intentions). A growing number of psychological researchers are turning their focus to this rubric, refining it and looking for ways in which we can put this new understanding of first impressions to use.
When we meet a person, we immediately and often unconsciously assess him or her for both warmth and competence. Whereas we obviously admire and help people who are both warm and competent and feel and act contemptuously toward the cold and incompetent, we respond ambivalently toward the other blends. People who are judged as competent but cold—including those in stereotyped groups such as Jews, Asians and the wealthy—provoke envy and a desire to harm, as violence against these groups has often shown. And people usually seen as warm but incompetent, such as mothers and the elderly, elicit pity and benign neglect.
New research is revealing that these split-second judgments are often wrong, however, because they rely on crude stereotypes and other mental shortcuts. Last year psychologist Nicolas Kervyn and his colleagues published studies showing how we jump to conclusions about people’s competence based on their warmth, and vice versa. When the researchers showed participants facts about two groups of people, one warm and one cold, the participants tended to assume that the warm group was less competent than the cold group; likewise, if participants knew one group to be competent and the other not, they asked questions whose answers confirmed their hunch that the first group was cold and the second warm. The upshot: “Your gain on one [trait] can be your loss on the other,” says Kervyn, now a postdoctoral researcher at Princeton.
This “compensation effect,” which occurs when we compare people rather than evaluating each one separately, runs counter to the well-known halo effect, in which someone scoring high on one quality gets higher ratings on other traits. But both effects are among several mistakes people often make in inferring warmth and competence. We see high-status individuals as competent even if their status was an accident of birth. And when we judge warmth, rivalry plays a role: “If someone is competing with you, you assume they’re a bad person,” Cuddy says.
The good news is that if you belong to a stereotyped group or otherwise know how people see you, you can try changing your image. A competent politician who strikes the public as cold, for example, can draw on his warmth reserves to better connect with voters. After all, Cuddy points out, “Everybody comes across as warm or competent in some area of their lives.”
This article was originally published with the title Mixed Impressions.
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6 Comments
Add CommentI find this article extremely interesting. The focus today is so much on wanting to be liked, or perceived as confident to the point of being false, in my opinion, then agonize over the stand-offish reaction to such a friendly greeting.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisDoes anyone wonder if the sexes lean more heavily towards one or the other?
Since we're talking sweeping statements, it could be a clue to the age old mystery of why the high school football captain discounts the overly friendly girl in favor of the 'witch'...
I found this article and the study it is commenting on interesting but lacking. I believe that prejudice is far more subtle and involves far more brain components than are mentioned here. I have come to believe that prejudice is more a result of even very minor but complex cultural clues than it is of visual intake.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI believe that human nature (nature and nurture combined) functions very well using stereotypes. Stereotypes are no more than generalizations which we use successfully a hundred (a thousand ?) times a day in our social interactions and judgements about people.
In my experience, use of language (particularly idioms), facial expressions, stance, dress etc. are more likely to invoke bias than just skin colour or facial features.
The above article assumes a culture in which everyone has the same cultural signals for 'friendliness' and 'confidence'.
Sometimes people asks: What do you think about jews? It is supposed that the question intends to detect the level of prejudices in the asked person, but in itself, it implies the assumption that the interviewed person DOES have prejudices, so it in itself is some kind of an insult, it would have been the same asking: How many children have you molested? The question has also a bias: it refers an specific culture, and no others, such as gypsies, bosquimans, and so on. Chinese are sometimes called the jews of East, as they are effective in doing business. You better don't ask nobody such kind of questions, and if asked one of these, just turn your back to the offender, as such questions are deeply unpolite, aggressive, and attack your privacy
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWho is "we?"
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisOne of the worst failed assumptions that go into this type of research is the politically correct assumption that all people are the same. This is wrong. Social standards, and ingroup / outgroup preferences differ between groups.
For example: In Israel, Orthodox Christian priests are rountinely spit upon when they retrace the path of Jesus, In Europe anyone that spit on jews would be arrested.
Ken
www.kenStech.com
I am happy to see the comment by jgrosay above. If only everyone who watches or listens to "news" organizations or responds to polls had the same level of sensitivity, we'd be far better informed, and a far more skeptical culture (referring to U.S.).
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThanks for that sensitive addition to the discussion.
I think they touched on something interesting when they mentioned the halo effect too. Both types of mistakes are common. I think this just indicates a general weakness w/ relying on overly simplistic stereotypes too much. Stereotypes are effective enough to help us get by, but I think we should always strive to get to know people the best we can before we make serious judgments about them.
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