When you
meet a person do you what do that person think about you first. On this
question a research says two questions everyone asks themselves when they meet
you.
The
answers to these two questions will have all sorts of knock-on effects for how
they think about you and how they behave towards you.
Are you warm hearted and/or competent?
Are you warm hearted and/or competent?
Professor Susan Fiske of
Princeton University has shown that all social judgments can be boiled down to
these two dimensions (Fiske et al., 2007):
1.
How warm is this person? The idea of warmth
includes things like trustworthiness, friendliness, helpfulness, sociability
and so on. Initial warmth judgements are made within a few seconds of meeting
you.
2.
How competent is this person? Competency judgements
take longer to form and include things like intelligence, creativity, perceived
ability and so on.
Susan
Fiske's research has looked at different cultures, times and types of social judgments,
but these two concepts come up again and again in slightly different guises.
Not only do we make these judgments about other people, but we frame their behavior
using these two questions; we ask ourselves whether it was friendly, moral,
sincere, clever etc..
The
primacy of warmth and competence may reflect evolved, instinctual reactions to
these two questions about others:
1.
Friend or foe? Is this person going
to hurt me or help me?
2.
Capable of hurting or
helping? Can this person help
me if they're friendly or hurt me if they're not?
How warm and competent do
other people find you? According to new research by Carlson et al. (2011) you probably know quite
well how other people view you.
Image Source: http://www.sxc.hu/photo/1339417
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