Efekt kompensacji w percepcji grup : rola motywacji epistemicznej

Abstract

The compensation effect (CE) is a phenomenon that occurs when social targets are evaluated on two fundamental dimensions of social perception: warmth and competence. When two social targets are compared, the two dimensions appear to be intertwined to compensate one another. When one social object is perceived as being better than the second object on one dimension, the second object is perceived as being better than the first on the other dimension. In the literature the CE is assumed to be used in order to align the perceived differences between groups, which justifies the social system. However, this explanation was, to our knowledge, never proven in an empirical study and is difficult to apply in many research contexts in which the CE had already been demonstrated. In this thesis, we proposed an alternative explanation of the CE, that the underlying mechanism is simply related to applying knowledge that was previously acquired from an environment in which complementary and ambivalent stereotypes are widespread and where the dimensions of warmth and competence are often negatively related. We propose that the purpose of the CE is to obtain quick and easy solution to the task of evaluating social objects on two dimensions. Reaching the solution is possible by applying previously learned knowledge regarding the negative relationship between the two fundamental dimensions. As such, the CE should be an especially attractive tool for people who are motivated to obtain simple solutions, namely, people with high need for cognitive closure (NFCC). In a series of five experiments we demonstrated that: (1) the more people believe in a negative relation between warmth and competence (positive characteristics on one dimension imply negative characteristics on the second dimension), the stronger the CE (especially among high NFCC participants); (2) the CE is related to individuals’ motivation to achieve closure: the CE appears among people with high, but not low NFCC, when nothing in the environment keeps them from using their preferred information processing styles; (3) experience of cognitive inconsistency refrains people high on NFCC from demonstrating the CE