Warmth judgments come first because intent predicts behavior.
Evidence
Humans are complicated stimuli, distinguished from most other objects by having intent and autonomy. Presumably, then, people first want to know each other’s individual or collective intent toward them and their groups. The SCM (Fiske, Cuddy, Glick, & Xu, 2002) calls this dimension warmth (trustworthiness, sociability). Warmth is fundamental because intent predicts behavior. For survival, sentries call out, “who goes there: friend or foe?” Second, one needs to know whether the other people can enact that intent, namely how competent (capable, agentic) they are. — Susan T. Fiske, Stereotype Content, 4
Categorization
- XREF: The friend-or-foe priority logic resonates with evolutionary psychology accounts of threat detection and with the primacy of agency/morality judgments in person perception.