Agency and communion are inferred from actions serving interests of self or others ALEKSANDRA CISLAK 1 AND BOGDAN WOJCISZKE 2 * 1 Institute of Psychology, Polish Academy of Science, Poland 2 Warsaw School of Social Psychology, Faculty in Sopot, Poland Abstract Agentic qualities are associated with self-interests of the trait possessor and communal qualities are associated with interests of other people (with whom the trait possessor interacts with). Based on this idea we hypothesized that information on behavior serving self-interests leads to inferences of agency while information on identical actions performed in the service of others’ interests leads to inferences of communion. These hypotheses were supported in a study where participants perceived a politician who acted for or against his own interest and (orthogonally) acted for or against interests of other people. Additionally, actions serving other-interest influenced attitudes toward the politician to a higher degree than actions serving his self-interest. The other-interest influence on attitudes was mediated by inferences of communal qualities of the politician while the self-interest influence on attitudes was mediated by inferences of agentic qualities of the politician. Copyright # 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. There is an emerging agreement among researchers that two basic content dimensions underlie social judgments. One of them is referred to under the names communion, warmth, or morality and pertains to functioning in social relations involving qualities like warmth, helpfulness, honesty, cooperation, and trustworthiness (and their opposites). The other— called competence or agency—pertains to task functioning and goal achievement involving qualities like efficiency, competence, persistence, and energy (and their opposites). These two dimensions play a crucial role in construal of everyday behavior and impression formation (Wojciszke, 1994) including perceptions of political and organizational leaders (Kinder & Sears, 1985; Wojciszke & Abele, 2008). They also constitute two basic dimensions of group perceptions as assumed by the stereotype content model (SCM) (Fiske, Cuddy, Glick, & Xu, 2002). These two dimensions are independent and predict systematic differences in emotions and behaviors directed at the stereotyped groups (Cuddy, Fiske, & Glick, 2007). WHAT ARE THE BASES TO INFER AGENCY AND COMMUNION? Provided universality of these two types of content, it is important to ask how they are inferred. What are the bases people use to decide whether a person (a group) is agentic/competent or not and whether she is communal/warm or not? Fiske, Cuddy, and Glick (2007) answer these questions in a functionalist way: when intentions are good for the perceiver, the target is perceived as warm/communal, but when intentions are malicious, the target is perceived as lacking these qualities. On the other side, when targets are seen as able to enact their intentions they are perceived as competent/ agentic. According to this account, the first dimension is about setting goals, as viewed from the perceiver’s perspective, and the second dimension is about efficiency of goal attainment. Because both benevolent and malicious intentions may be European Journal of Social Psychology Eur. J. Soc. Psychol. 38, 1103–1110 (2008) Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com) DOI: 10.1002/ejsp.554 *Correspondence to: Bogdan Wojciszke, Warsaw School of Social Psychology, ul. Chodakowska 19/31, 03-815 Warszawa, Poland. E-mail: bogdan@psychpan.waw.pl Copyright # 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Received 9 September 2007 Accepted 18 June 2008