Intergroup ascriptions of agency and warmth depend on context and goals: a study on stereotype congruency on NGOs and chemical companies

Agency and communion, also known as competence and warmth, are the Big Two fundamental dimensions based on which people outline their perceptions and form impressions of social targets, which include both individuals and groups. Warmth is often shown to play a primary role in gathering information about others, but this primacy can be reversed, and in Studies 1 & 2 it is argued that context and goals play a fundamental role in warmth and competence ascriptions. The following studies investigated whether changing the work context in terms of goals and positioning strategies influenced impression formation of people who are part of a specific company/organization. Moreover, all was set in an intergroup context to investigate the effects of the intervening ingroup bias. Participants were asked to choose one between two NGOs (Study 1) and chemical companies (Study 2) and to ascribe traits reflecting three fundamental dimensions of social perception (agency, sociability and morality) to both the NGO or chemical company that they chose to join (ingroup) and to the one they did not choose (outgroup). Results confirmed the hypotheses showing an overall favoritism effect of the ingroup over the outgroup, especially regarding the dimension of warmth for NGOs and agency for chemical companies. Thus, agency and warmth ascriptions to people who are part of a company/organization resulted aligned with the stereotypes usually associated with these contexts, showing a stereotype congruency effect.