The Dimensional Compensation Model

Abstract

selves and others, i.e., warmth/communion and competence/agency ( Fiske, 2015 ). These two dimensions reflect core challenges of human life, namely “getting along” and “getting ahead,” and epistemic motives, that is, understanding intentions and assessing resources. If people navigate the world as individuals and rely on interpersonal social cognition to orient interpersonal behavior, they also belong to larger social entities. As members of groups, people build upon intergroup perception to shape their intergroup behavior ( Yzerbyt & Demoulin, 2010 ). The present chapter brings together the work on fundamental dimensions and the research on intergroup relations and shows that intergroup perception often leads to compensation between both dimensions ( Yzerbyt, 2016 ). The first part of the chapter explains how the Stereotype Content Model has proposed that two dimensions apply to the perception of groups in general and stereotypes in particular. A closer examination of the model and the empirical work it generated reveals that stereotypes are most often “mixed” in terms of the two fundamental dimensions. The second part combines the insights of social perception work and the intergroup relations literature and presents the dimensional compensation model and its various empirical tests. The following three parts examine the consequences of this dimensional compensation effect, some of its boundary conditions, and new evidence regarding its underlying mechanisms. The final part concludes with a series of directions for future research.