Is job performance independent from career success? A conceptual distinction between competence and agency.

Adopting a social approach to social judgment, we conducted five studies to validate a conceptual distinction between agency and competence traits. Studies 1-3 revealed that competence traits (e.g.

Distinguishing the desire to learn from the desire to perform: The social value of achievement goals.

We sought to distinguish mastery goals (i.e., desire to learn) from performance goals (i.

Perceiving the target's state or state provoked by the target? An analysis of the descriptive and evaluative knowledge in person perception.

In line with the theory of traits as generalized affordances, the present article argues that target's states (TSs) and states provoked by a target (other's states (OSs) towards target) are two components of the meaning of traits referring, respectively, to a descriptive and to an evaluative knowledge of people. A preliminary study confirmed that TS and OS were equally representative of a trait. Two studies were designed to study the effects of practising the use of traits as either TS or OS categories (an induction procedure) on a subsequent person perception task, requiring participants to rate photographed targets on a series of traits.

Assigning trait adjectives in an evaluative context: quicker, more consistent, and less equivocal.

The objective was to examine the social conditions under which subjects could attribute trait adjectives to an unknown person, the paradigm of impression-formation at zero acquaintance. The situation on which the subject had to base his judgement was a 90-sec. film clip with sound of an individual reading a weather forecast.