Explaining the relationship between agency and communion by means of lay personality theories and connectionist modeling

Abstract

Research on the relationship between the "Big Two" dimensions of social perception - Agency and Communion - has produced inconsistent findings, from independence to positive, negative, or curvilinear associations. We propose that these inconsistencies stem from individual differences in cognitive representations of how traits interrelate, i.e., lay personality theories (LPTs). Using connectionist modeling, we simulated impression formation processes based on individuals’' unique networks of associations between Agency and Communion traits. Indeed, Simulation Study 1 successfully recreated the various relationships found in the literature. Second, an experiment demonstrated that individual differences in LPTs predicted social judgments. Simulation Study 2 showed that changes in the composition of a sample of individuals with heterogeneous LPTs result in different outcomes in the relationship between Agency and Communion. Our findings suggest that taking into account variability in LPTs helps resolve apparent contradictions in the literature, offering a new and unifying framework for understanding social perception.