The Primacy of Agency Over Competence in Status Perception

Abstract

A great deal of recent work has found that two fundamental dimensions underlie social judgment. The most common labels used to denote these dimensions are agency versus communion, and competence versus warmth. The present work aimed to disentangle agency understood as the motivation to promote the self from competence understood as ability, and to address their distinctive role in status perception. In Studies 1 and 2, participants were presented with a high- versus low-status target and asked to rate this target on agency, competence and warmth. In Study 3, participants were presented with an agentic, competent, and warm target and asked to rate their social status. Overall, our findings indicated that agency and competence operate as distinct dimensions in social judgment, and that agency is more related to social status than competence.