The Phenomenology of Social Perception: Sociability and Morality Perceptions map onto Experiences of Pleasure and Threat

Social judgment maps onto two fundamental dimensions: Warmth and Competence. Although recent social perception work shows that morality and sociability are two facets of Warmth dimension, their respective function remains to be understood. We propose that perceptions of sociability and morality denote two functionally distinct evaluations, i.e., how pleasurable and how threatening the target is, respectively. A set of 6 studies traced back pleasure and threat evaluations by investigating the specific phenomenological experiences associated with perceptions of morality and sociability. Using a variety of measures and different inductions of pleasure and threat, we provide evidence that sociability and morality perceptions come along with distinct sets of affect reflecting the presence or the absence of pleasure vs. threat, respectively. A final study showed that morality weighs more than sociability when their valences are pitted against each other, replicating the well-documented primacy of morality effect. Moreover, consistent with the idea that the avoidance of threat takes priority over the search for pleasure, this experiment further showed that immorality prompted unconditional threat-related experiences. In contrast, sociability elicited conditional pleasure-related experiences in that positive morality is required. The present research sheds new light on the respective functions of morality and sociability perceptions and provides a novel understanding of the primacy of morality in social impressions.