Morality and ability are two key dimensions of social judgment. Across four experiments (total N = 1,418, three preregistered), we examined how information about one dimension shapes impressions in the other. In Experiment 1, participants generated positive and negative behaviors related to either morality or ability and then evaluated each behavior on the other dimension. Negative moral behaviors led to stronger inferences of low ability than negative ability behaviors led to inferences of immorality (i.e., asymmetric Horn effect). No asymmetry emerged for positive behaviors (i.e., symmetric Halo effects). Experiments 2a and 2b confirmed the asymmetric Horn effect and showed it was stronger for extreme versus moderate negative behaviors. Experiment 3 showed that immoral behaviors elicited more perceived threat than unable behaviors, which partly explained the asymmetric horn effect. These findings complement and extend prior models of impression formation by highlighting the primacy of morality in influencing judgments on other fundamental content dimensions.

We introduce a novel approach to improving evaluation: brief description. Across seven main experiments and three supplemental experiments, people evaluated products more favorably after briefly describing them than merely encountering them. This improvement in product evaluation was partially due to an increased sense of effectiveness that arose from describing the products. These findings generalized across various product categories and held true whether people evaluated products in images or a tangible product. The describing-appreciation effect contributes to the literature on the labor-love effect and self-appraisal, and has implications for practitioners seeking to boost product evaluation. A brief description affords a scalable, cost-effective tool for marketers to enhance product evaluation and consumer satisfaction.

Most people believe that social media discourse is negative and divisive. Here we show how this negativity can evolve even when users are not motivated to be negative. We propose that social media users seek to differentiate themselves from other users, and it is easier to differentiate oneself through negativity than positivity because negative information is more heterogeneous and counternormative than positive information. This makes users increasingly likely to post negative comments as a conversation unfolds and it becomes more challenging to make unique contributions. Analyzing 2.05 billion comments from 2,150 Reddit communities shows that comments become more negative over time, both within threads and community histories. This trend toward negativity is mediated by the semantic uniqueness of comments, suggesting that it arises from users differentiating themselves. This trend is strongest when initial dialogue is positive, making negative comments highly counternormative. We replicate these patterns in an experiment simulating social media dialogue (n = 3,685). Participants become more negative over time, but only when incentivized to be unique, and especially when dialogue begins positively. These findings suggest that the structure of social media platforms interacts with human motivation to foster a drift toward negativity over time in online discourse.

This chapter reviews several dimensional models of stereotypes. We begin by discussing the number and content of the dimensions on which people describe societal groups. We then explain how the order of importance of the stereotype dimensions depends on both the index of importance (primacy, positivity, priority, or prevalence) as well as goals and motives. Next, we discuss some situational and personal variables that moderate the sign and size of the correlations between stereotype dimensions. Finally, we review some research on the behavioral consequences of stereotyping groups on these dimensions. The chapter focuses on several models that have engaged in an ongoing adversarial collaboration on stereotype dimensions to give a balanced overview of the fascinating topic of dimensional stereotypes.

We argue that one reason why people consider others’ ideological beliefs (i.e., progressive vs. conservative) is that people profit by predicting others’ exploration behavior from their beliefs. Eight experiments confirmed that people more readily invested in progressives when switching to novel options (i.e., exploration) was more profitable than staying with valuable resources (i.e., exploitation). In contrast, people more readily invested in conservatives when exploitation was more profitable than exploration. Thus, considering others’ beliefs may be one means to navigate ecologies with different reward structures, a task that has remained relevant throughout human history and across cultures.

How affective polarization in Western democracies results from the interplay of ideological differences and group identification remains unclear. To better understand these processes and address the call for falsifiable theories, we propose a formalized expectancy-value model of interpersonal likability in politics (EVIL-P). It argues that people (dis)like targets with (dis)similar political views (i.e., value), especially if these views are rare (i.e., expectancy). By reanalyzing data from the American National Election Studies (N = 38,868), the British Election Study (N = 24,522), and nine studies on ratings of societal groups that vary in political views (N = 6,587), we find support for EVIL-P. Expectancy and value interacted to predict people’s attitudes. Moreover, targets with moderate political views were liked most on average, and targets with more extreme political views had more extreme fans and haters. We discuss how EVIL-P contributes to research on affective polarization and helps testing related phenomena.

People appreciate members of their in-group, and they cooperate with them-tendencies we refer to as in-group love. Being a member of a minority (vs. majority) is a common experience that varies both between groups in a context and within a group between contexts, but how does it affect in-group love? Across six studies, we examined when and why being in the minority boosts in-group love. In Study 1, being in the minority boosted people's appreciation of various real-life in-groups but not out-groups. In Study 2, a real-life interaction between and within groups, people cooperated more with minority in-group (but not minority out-group) members. In Studies 3-6, we measured cooperation (Study 3, incentive-compatible), appreciation (Studies 4-6), and four mediators: perceived in-group distinctiveness, experienced in-group belongingness, expected in-group cooperation, and perceived in-group status. These four mediators independently and simultaneously explained why being in the minority boosted in-group love. In Studies 5 and 6, we observed two theoretical boundary conditions for the effect. The size of the effect was smaller when the minority in-group had many (vs. few) members (Study 5), and when the imbalance between the in-group and out-group was either low or high (here: 46% minority and 54% majority or 20% minority and 80% majority) rather than moderate (here: 33% minority and 67% majority). We discuss how these findings align with and build on optimal distinctiveness theory and other theoretical accounts. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

People perceive social groups along stereotype dimensions. Several models of social evaluation identify so-called horizontal (relational, warmth, communion) and vertical (achievement, competence, agency) judgments, also known as the Big Two. Each has two facets, respectively indicating perceived morality and friendliness for horizontal judgments plus ability and assertiveness for vertical judgments. Perceivers also locate groups within sociopolitical structures, such as socioeconomic status and ideological beliefs. These six commonly used stereotype dimensions (morality, friendliness, ability, assertiveness, status, and beliefs) each predict specific and pragmatic behaviors toward (members of) groups, including approach, investment, cooperation, and inclusion. Overall, the trait dimensions correlate positively (e.g., the two respective facets of each of the Big Two), but contextual goals can override general patterns. For example, when people encounter two unequal groups and strive for social justice, harmony and positive identity, the horizontal and vertical judgments correlate negatively. Contextual goals and transient motives also moderate the importance of the stereotype dimensions. We conclude by suggesting avenues for future research.

People appreciate others who seem similar to themselves. Two well-documented similarity-attraction effects are in-group favoritism (i.e., preference for in-groups over out-groups) and ideological favoritism (i.e., preference for the groups whose ideologies align [vs. conflict] with one's own beliefs). There is debate about whether ideological favoritism is stronger among conservatives, progressives, or neither, and research has yet to explore ideological asymmetry in in-group favoritism. Across five studies (Ntotal = 6,631), we confirmed a double dissociation: ideological favoritism was stronger among U.S. progressives, whereas in-group favoritism was stronger among U.S. conservatives. This pattern was robust across different samples of perceivers and groups and across various measures of aligned ideological beliefs, shared group membership, and attitudes toward the groups (i.e., judgments and feelings). We discuss potential explanations for the double dissociation. Certain psychological differences between conservatives and progressives (e.g., community orientation and cosmopolitanism) may direct their attention to different markers of allegiance.

We examined prospective (i.e., future-oriented) self-comparisons in an ecology with three empirically validated principles of impression formation. First, people can have more negative than positive attributes (diversity). But second, individuals do have more positive than negative attributes (frequency). Third, over time people generally improve by losing negative attributes and gaining positive attributes (growth). Three studies found that present-future similarities were most positive, the present self's unique attributes were most negative, and the future self's unique attributes were in between. In Study 1, this pattern emerged for both self-comparisons and acquaintance-comparisons. In Study 2, it emerged for both prospective and retrospective (i.e., past-oriented) self-comparisons. In Study 3, the pattern vanished when middle-aged people compared their present self to their old age self. Taken together, these findings largely support a realistic view of one's own future. The findings also lend some support for a self-enhancing view of what the future holds.

Dominant models of impression formation focus on two fundamental dimensions: a horizontal dimension of warmth/communion/trustworthiness and a vertical dimension of competence/agency/dominance. However, these models have typically been studied using theory-driven methods and stimuli of restricted complexity. We used a data-driven approach and naturalistic stimuli to explore the latent dimensions underlying >300,000 unconstrained linguistic descriptions of 1000 Facebook profile pictures from 2,188 participants. Via traditional (Exploratory Factor Analysis) and modern (natural language dictionaries, semantic sentence embeddings) approaches, we observed impressions to form with regard to the horizontal and vertical dimensions and their respective facets of sociability/morality and ability/assertiveness, plus the key demographic variables of gender, age, and race. However, we also observed impressions to form along numerous further dimensions, including adventurousness, conservatism, fitness, non-conformity, and stylishness. These results serve to emphasize the importance of high-dimensional models of impression formation, and help to clarify the content dimensions underlying unconstrained descriptions of individuals.

People join groups for various reasons – to feel that they belong, achieve great things because unity makes strength etc. (Abele et al., 2021; Koch et al., 2021). However, membership in some groups only brings trouble. Thus, people want to know the favorability of their current groups and alternatives. Unfortunately, flawless judgment of groups’ favorability is what dreams are made of. To put it in terms of Brunswik’s (1952) lens model, people must rely on proximal, manifest cues to judge the distal, latent truth of groups’ favorability, and they will make more errors than they prefer because cues are noisy. So what cues do people use?

People see societal groups as less moral, warm, and likable if their ideology is more dissimilar to the ideology of the self (i.e., ideological prejudice). We contribute to the debate on whether ideological prejudice in the United States is stronger in conservatives, progressives, or neither. Investigating the American National Election Studies, we found that between 1972 and 2021, ideological prejudice was stronger in conservatives. However, investigating studies conducted to develop the agency-beliefs-communion model, we found that between 2016 and 2021, ideological prejudice was stronger in progressives. We report various analyses of both research programs and two new studies that rule out several explanations for this contradiction. Additional analytic and experimental evidence suggests that political rule (vs. opposition) may explain the robust heterogeneity in asymmetric ideological prejudice. Ideological prejudice shifted toward being stronger in conservatives when the United States was governed by Democrats and toward being stronger in progressives when the United States was governed by Republicans. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

While reminders can help by encouraging prosocial behaviors, we propose that they can also hurt. Across 10 studies, most of which focus on reminders to express gratitude, we find that reminders interfere with impressions of genuine prosociality. Whether people are reminded subtly (Studies 1a and 6-8) or blatantly (Studies 2-5) to express gratitude, the reminder is perceived to put social pressure on the potential thanker, making reminded thankers seem less genuine and less likable than spontaneous thankers. This is true from the perspective of both a third-party observer (Studies 1a and 2-7) and the receiver of thanks (Study 4), regardless of whether the judgments are about hypothetical (Studies 1a, 2-3, and 6-7) or real behavior (Studies 4-5). We find that this phenomenon can have material consequences: Receivers of gratitude expressions allocated a larger proportion of bonus money to a spontaneous thanker compared to a reminded thanker (Study 5). We also find that to overcome the decrement in their perceived genuineness, reminded thankers must engage in costly signaling by thanking more elaborately (Study 7), and reminded thankers spontaneously do this (Study 8). Overall, while reminding people to engage in prosocial actions may encourage laudable behavior (Study 6), our findings suggest that doing so may also undermine the actor's perceived genuineness, leading to material consequences and raising the bar for what is required to signal sincerity. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Five studies (N = 7972) validated a brief measure and model of four facets of social evaluation (friendliness and morality as horizontal facets; ability and assertiveness as vertical facets). Perceivers expressed their personal impressions or estimated society’s impression of different types of targets (i.e., envisioned or encountered groups or individuals) and numbers of targets (i.e., between six and 100) in the separate, items-within-target mode or the joint, targets-within-item mode. Factor analyses confirmed that a two-items-per-facet measure fit the data well and better than a four-items-per-dimension measure that captured the Big Two model (i.e., no facets, just the horizontal and vertical dimensions). As predicted, the correlation between the two horizontal facets and between the two vertical facets was higher than the correlations between any horizontal facet and any vertical facet. Perceivers’ evaluations of targets on each facet were predictors of unique and relevant behavior intentions. Perceiving a target as more friendly, moral, able, and assertive increased the likelihood of relying on the target’s loyalty, fairness, intellect, and hubris in an economic game, respectively. These results establish the external, internal, convergent, discriminant, and predictive validity of the brief measure and model of four facets of social evaluation.

Complying with Brunswik’s (1952; 1955; 1956) call for representative design, we developed an ecologically valid ABC model (agency / socioeconomic success, conservative-progressive beliefs, and communion) of spontaneous stereotypes about groups.

We show an interactive effect of perceiver-target similarity in ideological beliefs and target power on impressions of target morality. Consistent with prior research, perceivers rated targets with dissimilar ideologies as less moral than targets with similar ideologies, but this difference in ratings was magnified for powerful targets relative to less powerful targets. We argue that these results emerged because perceivers expected similar-ideology, powerful (vs. powerless) targets to help the self more, and expected dissimilar-ideology, powerful (vs. powerless) targets to hurt the self more. We establish this effect when people evaluate politicians (Study 1), groups, and individuals (Studies 2a-2b); demonstrate its predictive power over other kinds of interpersonal similarity; and show that it affects morality judgments uniquely when compared with other consequential dimensions of social evaluation. Finally, we manipulated power experimentally and showed the interaction when the difference between high- and low-power manipulations was controlled over just $1 (Studies 3-4).