The Primacy of Morality in Impression Development: Theory, Research, and Future Directions.

Over the past few decades, two-factor models of social cognition have emerged as a dominantframework for understanding impression development. These models suggest that twodimensions – warmth and competence – are key in shaping our cognitive, emotional, andbehavioral reactions toward social targets. More recently, research has jettisoned the warmthdimension, distinguishing instead between sociability (e.g., friendliness and likeability) andmorality (e.g., honesty and trustworthiness) and showing that morality is far more important thansociability (and competence) in predicting the evaluations we make of individuals and groups.Presenting research from our laboratories, we show that moral categories are central at all stagesof impression development, from implicit assumptions, to information gathering and to finalevaluations. Moreover, moral trait information has a dominant role in predicting people’sbehavioral reactions toward social targets. We also show that morality dominates impressiondevelopment, because it is closely linked to the essential judgment of whether another party’sintentions are beneficial or harmful. Thus, our research informs a new framework forunderstanding person and group perception: the Moral Primacy Model (MPM) of impressiondevelopment. We conclude by discussing how the MPM relates to classic and emerging modelsof social cognition and by outlining a trajectory for future research