Forming implementation intentions ("If I encounter situation X, then I will perform response Y in order to achieve Z") promotes the translation of goal intentions ("I wish to achieve Z") into real actions. The aim of the present article is to review the action control processes elicited by this technique. We analyze the processes implied in the initiation of responses and in their maintenance. Specifically, we will review 1) how implementation intentions modify past habits, that are resistant to change; 2) the flexible and tenacious characteristic of goal pursuit when this strategy has been formed; 3) using the concept of sensorimotor simulations, we will analyze how the mere verbal "if, then" act may facilitate the enactment of real actions.

Se former une intention d’implémentation (« si je rencontre la situation X, alors je réaliserai la réponse Y dirigée vers le but Z ») favorise le passage d’une intention de but (« je veux Z ») à des actions concrètes. Cet article dresse une revue des processus de contrôle de l’action générés par cette technique. Nous analysons les processus impliqués dans l’initiation des actions puis ceux responsables de leur maintien. Nous verrons en particulier 1) comment l’intention d’implémentation peut modifier les habitudes passées, qui sont résistantes au changement ; 2) le caractère flexible et tenace de la poursuite effective d’un but lorsque cette technique a été formée ; 3) à la lumière du concept de simulations sensori-motrices, comment le simple fait de créer un lien verbal « si-alors » entre situation et réponse peut conduire à la production réelle de cette réponse.

Forming implementation intentions (i.e., if-then planning) is a powerful self-regulation strategy that enhances goal attainment by facilitating the automatic initiation of goal-directed responses upon encountering critical situations. Yet, little is known about the consequences of forming implementation intentions for goal attainment in situations that were not specified in the if-then plan. In three experiments, we assessed goal attainment in terms of speed and accuracy in an object classification task, focusing on situations that were similar or dissimilar to critical situations and required planned or different responses. The results of Experiments 1 and 3 provide evidence for a facilitation of planned responses in critical and in sufficiently similar situations, enhancing goal attainment when the planned response was required and impairing it otherwise. In Experiment 3, additional unfavorable effects however emerged in situations that were dissimilar to the critical one but required the planned response as well. We discuss theoretical implications as well as potential benefits and pitfalls emerging from these non-planned effects of forming implementation intentions.

In social interactions, the movements performed by others can be used to anticipate their intention. The present paper investigates whether cooperative vs competitive contexts influence the kinematics of object-directed motor actions and whether they modulate the effect of social intention on motor actions. An "Actor" and a "Partner" participated in a task consisting in displacing a wooden dowel under time constraint. Before this Main action, the Actor performed a Preparatory action which consisted in placing the dowel at the center of the table. Information about who would make the forthcoming Main action was provided only to the Actor through headphones. Results demonstrate an exaggeration of spatial and temporal actions' parameters when acting for the Partner, in cooperative, as well as in competitive context. This finding suggests that the motor manifestation of social intention is largely determined by non-conscious implicit processes that seem little influenced by the context of social interaction.

Implementation intentions (if-then plans) help people to automatically perform goal-directed behaviors when they encounter goal-relevant critical situations. Besides the intended beneficial effects on goal attainment, however, goal-directed behaviors might entail various costs. Successful goal striving then requires flexible tenacity: tenaciously holding on to behaviors that inflict bearable costs but flexibly backing off from performing excessively costly behaviors. In the present research, we investigated whether goal striving with implementation intentions is characterized by such flexible tenacity. In Experiments 1 and 2, implementation intention participants held on to goal-directed behaviors that inflicted bearable costs (sustaining unpleasant noise and annoying effort), whereas participants with mere goal intentions reduced their performance of goal-directed behaviors. In Experiment 3, both goal and implementation intention participants backed off from performing an excessively costly behavior (involving monetary loss). This effect was more pronounced among implementation intention participants, who additionally lowered their goal commitment. We conclude that implementation intentions render goal striving tenaciously flexible, facilitating goal-directed behaviors unless this is associated with excessive costs.

The purpose of the current resarch was to compare adolescents’ stereotypes of homosexuality and heterosexuality from Beauvois’s theory of social value (1995 ; Dubois, 2005). We asked forty-three secondary school students to describe homosexuals and heterosexuals, from a list of personality traits, by giving their own judgments and by indicating how they thought that society perceived them. We expected them to think that the homosexuals were less desirable but at the same time just as socially useful as heterosexuals. We also expected the participants to feel that, in society, homosexuals were considered as less desirable and also less socially useful than heterosexuals. Those assumptions were only partially verified, especially among female participants. The results are discussed in terms of gender differences in the perception of homosexuality and in the consequences of these stereotypes.

This study tested the effect of voter's political orientation on the importance they placed on agency, competence, morality, and sociability as qualities required for being President of the French Republic. It furthermore assessed the participants' judgments of the five main candidates of the French Presidential Election of 2012 on those dimensions. The results showed that, compared to left-wing voters, right-wing voters placed greater importance on agency and less importance on morality and sociability as qualities required for being president. Right-wing voters differentiated between candidates with respect to agency more than competence, whereas the reverse pattern was observed for left-wing voters. Voters differentiated between candidates with respect to morality as much as sociability. Finally, the participants' ratings of candidates showed a partisan effect: Left-wing voters rated left-wing candidates as being more competent, moral, and sociable, the same being true of right-wing candidates by right-wing voters. Ratings of candidates' agentic qualities were less dependent on the voter's political orientation. These data provide support for how people perceived qualities necessary for being President in France.

The aim of the study was to test whether a screening navigation program leads to more favorable health beliefs and decreases social inequalities in them. The selected 261 noncompliant participants in a screening navigation versus a usual screening program arm had to respond to health belief measures inspired by the Protection Motivation Theory. Regression analyses showed that social inequalities in perceived efficacy of screening, favorable attitude, and perceived facility were reduced in the screening navigation compared to the usual screening program. These results highlight the importance of health beliefs to understand the mechanism of screening navigation programs in reducing social inequalities.

La réussite éducative est une préoccupation importante de l’ensemble des acteurs de l’école : les parents, les enseignants, les élèves, etc. D’un point de vue législatif, ce concept, apparu dans le volet « Égalité des chances » du Plan de cohésion sociale du 18 janvier 2005, a fait récemment l’objet d’une attention particulière avec la création notamment d’un ministère dédié. Cet article examine la question de la réussite scolaire et des traits associés à celle-ci. Plus précisément, il tente de montrer que les traits associés à la réussite scolaire peuvent servir à la fois à décrire les personnes mais aussi et surtout à leur signifier leur place dans la hiérarchie sociale.

In line with the theory of traits as generalized affordances, the present article argues that target's states (TSs) and states provoked by a target (other's states (OSs) towards target) are two components of the meaning of traits referring, respectively, to a descriptive and to an evaluative knowledge of people. A preliminary study confirmed that TS and OS were equally representative of a trait. Two studies were designed to study the effects of practising the use of traits as either TS or OS categories (an induction procedure) on a subsequent person perception task, requiring participants to rate photographed targets on a series of traits. Results show that both the differentiation between targets and evaluative consistency of ratings were enhanced under the OS condition compared to TS and control (with no practice of traits) conditions. Importantly, Study 2 tends to show that the effects of the induction procedure are not limited to the practised traits but also generalize to unpractised traits. Implications of these findings for social perception research are discussed.

In daily life, adjectives as "sympathetic" "aggressive" are used to speak about people. But what do we mean when we say that Mary is sympathetic? What kind of knowledge do we communicate about Mary? This chapter aims at analyzing the different meanings of those adjectives within trait psychology and social psychology frameworks. In trait psychology, they are called "personality traits" and are defined as "generalized and personalized determining tendencies - consistent and stable modes of an individual's adjustment to his environment" (Allport & Odbert, 1936, p. 26). Sympathetic is considered as a descriptive psychological property of Mary. This definition is convenient in personality assessment tradition, because it enables the measure of individual differences based on correlational design. Nevertheless, this definition of traits is subordinate to the study of personality and individual differences and does not enable to analyse the meaning and the function of traits-labels. In social psychology, two complementary perspectives share the idea that trait labels are polysemous entities and that their meaning is directly linked to their social function. The perspective of the theory of traits as generalized affordances (Beauvois & Dubois, 2000) enables to distinguish evaluative knowledge- how others act toward targets who possess these traits (behavioral affordances)-, from descriptive knowledge- how targets who possess theses traits act (descriptive behavior)-, deemed to be of limited importance in trait common usage. Sympathetic is used to communicate the social value of Mary, her social affordance which guides my own behavior towards Mary (I invite Mary to my birthday) rather than her psychological property. The other perspective stipulates that traits refer to both the descriptive behaviors and the descriptive states (Mollaret & Mignon, 2007). Sympathetic is also a descriptive knowledge of Mary's states Mary's state (e.g. Mary feels happy). This description implying a state verb directs a perception of Mary as acted by the situation (Brown and Fish, 1983). We will report new research, based on experimental design, showing that person perception depends on the function of personality traits which is determined by social practices. Implications of different meanings of traits, both for individual differences and also for other kind of judgments (e.g. judgment of responsibility) will be presented.

This paper develops a polysemic view of traits labels and outlines the fact that the same label may activate two modes of person perception (1) the agent mode is elicited by behavioural descriptions and emphasizes the role of the actor and (2) the experiencer mode is elicited by state descriptions and implies an external view of people. The experiment was designed to investigate consequences of mode induction on perception of familiar people. Participants had first to rate traits as behavioural descriptions (agent condition) or as state descriptions (experiencer condition). Then, they had to think about four familiar persons, located at the four poles of the circumplex taxonomy ('a person they like', 'a person they don't like', 'a person who has qualities to get on in life', 'a person who lacks qualities to get on in life') and to rate them on a variety of traits scales. Control participants were directly enrolled in the description phase. Results show that, compared to agent induction and control conditions, state induction weakened (1) the evaluative consistency of trait ratings within a dimension (2) the perceived differentiation between people. Consequences of the polysemic conception of traits are discussed. Copyright (c) 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

La psychologie des traits est fondée sur l'approche lexicale de la personnalité, bien définie par Goldberg (1990). Elle consiste à utiliser le langage naturel, en particulier le lexique des adjectifs de personnalité, comme base d'étude des différences individuelles. Dans cette contribution, nous montrerons que cette approche impose sa définition des traits comme des outils de codage des différences sans pour autant en faire l'analyse. Nous proposons de faire l'examen de la signification du lexique sans le lier a priori à la description de la personnalité. Il apparaît alors que les adjectifs sont, en eux-mêmes très ambigus, et que cette ambiguïté n'est levée que par des pratiques sociales auxquelles correspondent des pratiques langagières. Enfin, nous défendrons l'idée que prendre appui sur la polysémie de ce lexique (plutôt que de l'ignorer) est le meilleur moyen de comprendre les enjeux sociaux de la description de la personnalité.

Le but de cet article introductif au numéro thématique, « Approches scientifiques de la personnalité : enjeux et controverses », est de présenter trois approches différentes de l'étude scientifique de la personnalité et du jugement de personnalité : l'approche factorielle, les approches psychosociales, les approches centrées sur l'individu. Dans un premier temps, nous expliquons leurs fondements théoriques. Dans un second temps, nous présentons les articles composant ce numéro.

In this research, we studied the influence of the norm of internality on a professional evaluation task. 44 executives were asked to evaluate applicants for a job promotion. They were provided with two kinds of information regarding the candidate: a) an evaluation of the target's previous job performance (excellent/medium) by a supervisor; and b) the target's answers (internal/external) to an internality questionnaire. The dependent variables measured 1) the professional worth of the applicant and 2) access to judgment criteria by the executives. Results showed that excellent candidates were preferred to medium ones, and more importantly, that internal candidates were preferred to external ones. Both factors (job performance and internality) are equally important in the proportion of variance they explained. Nevertheless, executives estimated that job performance was the main criterion they used to judge the applicant. This difference between objective and subjective weight of the two factors (as well as correlation analysis) shows that subjects did not systematically have access to judgment criteria.

The authors compared an affordance operationalization to two traditional operationalizations of traits. Following Beauvois and Dubois (2000), it is argued that traits involve a consistency in both the target behaviors (TBs) and others' behaviors toward the target (OBs). Conceptually, TBs represent descriptive knowledge (what the target tends to do) and OBs represent functional knowledge (what the target tends to afford). To compare the operationalizations, 49 participants were asked to judge videotapes of 12 targets using one of three rating modes: (a) global trait labels, (b) TBs, or (3) OBs. Results showed that (a) targets were more differentiated with OBs than with TBs or trait labels and (b) trait scales were more homogeneous with OBs than with TBs or trait labels. Consequences of a Gibsonian approach to person perception are discussed.