What This Study Found
This paper summarizes what Fiske and Cuddy found previously: when meeting someone new, we have to form an immediate judgment on two questions:
1) is the other person a friend or a foe / do they want to help me or threaten me?
2) are they able to act on their intentions, so can they help or threaten me?
This then leads to a 2x2 table of perceptions, where others can be warm/friendly or cold/threatening, and they can be competent or incompetent. In reality, perceptions are presumably continuous, but let's say we categorize these continuous perceptions to simplify a bit:
- kind & competent others
- kind & incompetent others
- threatening & competent others
- threatening & incompetent others
This paper reviews 'recent' findings which provide evidence for this model. These more recent findings show that people, across the world and across situations and cultures, react to people in these 4 quadrants in predictable and consistent ways, both in how they feel and how they behave towards those others.
Why This Matters for Kind Leaders
If you are kind, friendly, or warm, then chances are that others will react to you at least initially on a scale that ranges from 'pity & sympathy' (if they perceive you as incompetent) to 'pride & admiration' (if they think you're competent.
The entire story is a little more complicated of course...for example, if you are 'on their team' they want you to be competent, but if you are competing with them / work against them, they might be biased to perceive you as less competent than you really are.
Access the Full Paper
Fiske, S. T., Cuddy, A. J. C., & Glick, P. (2007). Universal dimensions of social cognition: Warmth and competence. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 11(2), 77–83. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2006.11.005
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