Social Judgment Norms and Social Utility: When It Is More Valuable to Be Useful Than Desirable

Abstract

The idea of social norm is often associated with the idea of value. However, such a simple association has often been criticized. The criticism seems to lie in the polysemy and the vagueness associated with the idea of value. The present study was based on the distinction drawn between two dimensions of value that people or objects can have, and its experimental operationalization in personality traits: (1) social desirability (SD), which refers to affective valence or motivation and covers traits such as sympathetic and nice, and (2) social utility (SU), which corresponds to how well a person meets the requirements of a given society, and covers traits like dynamic and competent. The desirability-utility distinction was used here to investigate what kind of value a norm can activate. Our hypothesis was that SU would be more elicited by normativity than SD. This hypothesis was tested in three studies in which participants were asked to describe target people (with traits pertaining either to SD or to SU) whose answers on a questionnaire varied in degree of normativeness (judge paradigm). The results support the hypothesis; the more normative targets are, the more they are described in SU terms.