Of Nice and Mean: The Personal Relevance of Others’ Competence Drives Perceptions of Warmth

Abstract

Past research shows that when forming an impression of an interdependent person, perceivers are motivated to look for information relevant to their goals and interests. The present experiments examined what happens after this information-seeking stage and showed that the relevance of the target’s attributes for one’s goals and interests drives warmth impressions. Using both a scenario (Experiment 1) and realistic methodologies (Experiment 3), we showed that when the perceiver had to collaborate with a target, the more competent the target, the more perceivers anticipated success and the more the target came across as warm. By contrast, in a competition setting, the competence of the target negatively affected prospects of success and impressions of warmth. Experiment 2 further showed that the target’s competence drove warmth impressions only when perceivers attached a great value to the success of the task, suggesting that these inferences have a motivational underpinning.