Practise Warmth, Sincerity and Competence

What it is

The 2007 paper is titled Universal dimensions of social cognition: warmth and competence, and it is the reference point for the idea. A 2017 chapter by Cydney Dupree and colleagues, in a volume on social signal processing, argues that people must quickly judge whether a stranger is friendly and how capable the person is, and it reviews laboratory, cross-cultural and survey research supporting warmth and competence as universal dimensions.

Storr puts the pair to work in the first rule of his book, which asks a person to present themselves so that others grant them prestige freely. He credits Fiske with the argument that people ask of others what their intentions are and whether they can act on them. In his account, warmth shows that a person is not trying to dominate and competence shows that the person is useful. Sincerity, his addition, shows that the person plays fair. For someone leading a group, he adds that commitment to the group matters, offered without arrogance.

A close cousin comes from trait vocabulary. Andrea Abele and Bogdan Wojciszke proposed in 2007 that trait words fall into two broad dimensions, agency and communion. In their first study, communion accounted for most of the variance. They also reported that agency was valued more from the self's point of view and communion more from the other person's. Agency and communion sit close to competence and warmth, though the two vocabularies come from different research programmes and are best kept apart.

In effect

The pair shows up wherever people form views of one another quickly. In a 2006 study by Janine Willis and Alex Todorov, participants judged unfamiliar faces on attractiveness, likeability, trustworthiness, competence and aggressiveness, and judgements made after 100 milliseconds closely matched judgements made with no time limit. Trustworthiness and competence are among the traits measured, which makes the study a useful marker of how fast a first view starts.

The pair also appears in research on signals. Silvia Bellezza and colleagues reported that visible nonconformity, such as departing from a dress code, was credited with higher status and competence than conformity, through perceived autonomy, and that the effect disappeared for observers who did not know the setting. Competence is the named outcome there, and the reading of a signal depended on what the observer expected. The site's page on the Red Sneakers Effect covers that work.

For a professional working among people from many countries, the practical use of the rule is a check on any self-description: which of the qualities does it put first, and does it leave room for the others? Abele and Wojciszke's asymmetry suggests one reason to ask, because an audience may weigh the other person's warmth more than the person weighs it about themselves.

What it does not say

The rule describes what observers tend to ask, and it does not say how a particular person will be judged. Warmth and competence are not the only things observers weigh, and sincerity is Storr's addition to the pair rather than a third dimension tested alongside it.

Agency and communion are a related pair and are not the same thing as warmth and competence. The fast-judgement study measured impressions of faces in a laboratory, so it shows how quickly a view starts, not how lasting it is.

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