Abstract
In two experiments we show that the context in which groups are perceived influences how they are judged in a compensatory manner on the fundamental dimensions of social judgment, that is, warmth and competence. We manipulate the type of country (high in competence and low in warmth vs. high in warmth and low in competence) to which a target country is compared. Our data show that the target country is perceived as warmer and less competent when the comparison country is stereotypically high (vs. low) in competence and low (vs. high) in warmth. We also found compensation correlationally across targets and across dimensions in that the higher the comparison country is rated on one of the two dimensions, the higher the target country is rated on the other. Compensation effects are shown to affect judgments of both the ingroup (Experiment 1) and an outgroup (Experiment 2). Our results shed new light on context effects in group judgments as well as on the compensatory relation of the two fundamental dimensions of social judgment.
Limitations and Future Research
The comparison groups that we have used in both experiments were the object of mixed stereotypes. We consider these choices as a necessary first step to show the effects that we hypothesized. It would be interesting in future work to try and disentangle both dimensions by working with comparison groups that vary only on one dimension but are similar on the other.
As for the system justification interpretation, we would like to test whether this hydraulic compensatory process is a deliberate attempt to seek justice in the world. If so, we would speculate that there exist individual differences that are likely to affect the tendency to produce compensation. A second, related, issue concerns whether the compensatory pattern that we have uncovered in intergroup comparisons is a relative automatic and spontaneous judgmental effect, not necessarily resulting from conscious deliberation. It might seem that if the compensation process represents an attempt to seek justice in the world, consistent with a system justification point of view, then it would not be an automatic and non-conscious process. But we are not convinced that this is the case and are currently researching this and related questions.
