Carrier, Antonin <br/><br/>
Competence and Agency in Social Judgment 

 -  2014.<br/>							 
<br/><br/> 69 
<br/><br/> There is a broad consensus about the bidimensional structure of social judgment. These two dimensions have received various designations, such as agency-communion or competence-warmth. However, the concepts of agency and competence as presented in literature on social judgment seem to reflect different realities rather than simple interchangeable designations of the same dimension. An inventory of the traits used in agency-communion and competence-warmth models is broadly in line with this conclusion. The study presented in this article uses traits from this inventory and shows that agency and competence emerge spontaneously as two distinct components in social judgment. This distinction has proven to be useful in the understanding of social status perception. Our findings showed that the difference between high and low status targets is higher for agency than competence. Moreover, results indicated that the communion-warmth dimension is uncorrelated with competence but negatively correlated with agency. These results highlight the importance of recognizing each dimension’s content diversity.