When It's Bad to Be Friendly and Smart: The Desirability of Sociability and Competence Depends on Morality.

Author(s)

Justin F LandyFollow
Jared Piazza
Geoffrey P Goodwin

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

9-1-2016

Publication Title

Personality and social psychology bulletin

Volume

42

Issue/Number

9

First Page

1272

ISSN

1552-7433

Last Page

1290

Abstract/Excerpt

Morality, sociability, and competence are distinct dimensions in person perception. We argue that a person's morality informs us about their likely intentions, whereas their competence and sociability inform us about the likelihood that they will fulfill those intentions. Accordingly, we hypothesized that whereas morality would be considered unconditionally positive, sociability and competence would be highly positive only in moral others, and would be less positive in immoral others. Using exploratory factor analyses, Studies 1a and 1b distinguished evaluations of morality and sociability. Studies 2 to 5 then showed that sociability and competence are evaluated positively contingent on morality-Study 2 demonstrated this phenomenon, while the remaining studies explained it (Study 3), generalized it (Studies 3-5), and ruled out an alternative explanation for it (Study 5). Study 6 showed that the positivity of morality traits is independent of other morality traits. These results support a functionalist account of these dimensions of person perception.

DOI

10.1177/0146167216655984

NSUWorks Citation

Landy, J., Piazza, J., Goodwin, G. (2016). When It's Bad to Be Friendly and Smart: The Desirability of Sociability and Competence Depends on Morality.. Personality and social psychology bulletin, 42(9), 1272-1290.
Available at: https://nsuworks.nova.edu/cps_facarticles/1766