Which Basic Rules Underlie Social Judgments? Agency Follows a Zero-Sum Principle and Communion Follows a Non-Zero-Sum...

How are people who generally see others positively evaluated themselves? We propose that the answer to this question crucially hinges on the content domain: We hypothesize that Agency follows a "zero-sum principle" and therefore people who see others ashighin Agency are perceived aslowin Agency themselves. In contrast, we hypothesize that Communion follows a "non-zero-sum principle" and therefore people who see others ashighin Communion are perceived ashighin Communion themselves. We tested these hypotheses in a round-robin and a half-block study. Perceiving others as agentic was indeed linked to being perceived as low in Agency. To the contrary, perceiving others as communal was linked to being perceived as high in Communion, but only when people directly interacted with each other. These results help to clarify the nature of Agency and Communion and offer explanations for divergent findings in the literature.