Perceptions of comparative optimism and perceptions of career success: Experimental evidence for a bidirectional effect.

Audiences generally view people who display more (versus less) comparative optimism more favorably. We explored whether audiences view a target who displays comparative optimism as more professionally successful, and conversely, whether they view a target who is more professionally successful as more comparatively optimistic. In Study 1, participants estimated the career success of a target that varied in level of comparative optimism.

The relationship between social status and the components of agency.

Building on the two fundamental dimensions of social judgment distinguishing communion from agency, the purpose of the present work was to show that the strength of the relationship between social status and agency depends on specific components at issue: assertiveness, competence, and effort. Four experimental studies were conducted using two complementary paradigms. In Studies 1 and 2, we manipulated social status, and participants had to rate the target on competence, assertiveness, and effort.

The Dynamics of Compensation: When Ingroup Favoritism Paves the Way for Outgroup Praise.

Compensation research suggests that when people evaluate their own and another group, the search for positive differentiation fuels the emergence of compensatory ratings on the two fundamental dimensions of social perception, competence and warmth. In two experiments, we tested whether obstacles to positive differentiation on the preferred dimension disrupted compensation. Both experiments showed that high-status (low-status) group members grant the outgroup a higher standing on warmth (competence) when positive differentiation can be achieved on the orthogonal dimension, competence (warmth).

Comparative Pessimism or Optimism: Depressed Mood, Risk-Taking, Social Utility and Desirability.

Comparative optimism can be defined as a self-serving, asymmetric judgment of the future. It is often thought to be beneficial and socially accepted, whereas comparative pessimism is correlated with depression and socially rejected. Our goal was to examine the social acceptance of comparative optimism and the social rejection of comparative pessimism in two dimensions of social judgment, social desirability and social utility, considering the attributions of dysphoria and risk-taking potential (studies 2 and 3) on outlooks on the future.

Compensation in intergroup relations: an investigation of its structural and strategic foundations.

Recent work in intergroup relations stresses the role of two fundamental dimensions, competence and warmth, which organize the perception of social groups. A pattern often encountered in people's ratings is one of compensation in that a group that is evaluated higher than another group on one of the two fundamental dimensions is also judged lower on the other fundamental dimension. Based on Social Identity Theory, the present work extends previous research on compensation by examining boundary conditions as well as underlying psychological processes.