ABSTRACT
What are the ultimate motives that instigate individuals’ behaviors? Is it power? Is it love? What are the aims of social perception? Does social perception aim at recognizing likeable others or does it aim at detecting dangerous others? How can an individual’s behavior be described both from the perspective of the actor and from the perspective of an observer? These are very basic questions that can be addressed with the here proposed agency-communion framework. Agency (competence, assertiveness) refers to existence of an organism as an individual, to “getting ahead” and to individual goal-pursuit; communion (warmth, morality) refers to participation of an individual in a larger organism, to “getting along” and to forming bonds. The introductory chapter shows how this agency-communion framework helps to answer research questions in motivation, personality, social cognition, self-perception, and stereotypes. It is an overarching framework integrating a number of theories and also placing weight on content instead of processes only.
