Vincent Yzerbyt

• Professor of Psychology
• Professor (Full) at Catholic University of Louvain

Research on approach/avoidance training (AAT) effects shows that approach (i.e., reducing the distance between the self and a stimulus) leads to more positive evaluations of stimuli than avoidance (i.e., increasing the distance between the self and a stimulus). The present experiments relied on a grounded cognition approach to extend this finding b...

Building on prior work on regulatory fit in leader–follower contexts, the present work investigated such fit regarding followers’ locomotion mode (the concern to move forward and maintain action flow) and leader assertiveness. In three studies, we recruited English‐speaking employees online ( N total = 948) and assessed their regulatory mode. In St...

Leadership style preferences are in part shaped by differences in people’s self-regulation. However, research shows inconsistent findings regarding the relation between followers’ regulatory mode (locomotion – a need for maintaining movement and change; and assessment – a need for evaluating and critically comparing) and their preferences for direc...

The reverse correlation is an innovative method to capture visual representations (i.e., classification images, CIs) of social targets. However, this method necessitates many trials to compute high-quality CIs, which poses important practical and economic challenges. We introduce a new version of the reverse correlation method, namely, the Brief-RC...

In three studies, we examined a novel approach to the social evaluation of groups whereby we combined a typology of groups with a recent model of the two fundamental dimensions and four facets of social evaluation. We investigated two main questions. First, whereas previous research has proven the usefulness of the two-dimension/four-facet model fo...

In January 2022, several vaccination policies were debated to address the Omicron outbreak in Belgium. Considering variability in risk perception and vaccine uptake, this study aimed to understand differences in support and expectations for four scenarios, ranging from relaxed to restrictive vaccination policies, to inform policymakers. Using an on...

Collective action is a powerful tool for social change and is fundamental to women and girls’ empowerment on a societal level. Collective action towards gender equality could be understood as intentional and conscious civic behaviors focused on social transformation, questioning power relations, and promoting gender equality through collective effo...

Five studies (N = 7972) validated a brief measure and model of four facets of social evaluation (friendliness and morality as horizontal facets; ability and assertiveness as vertical facets). Perceivers expressed their personal impressions or estimated society’s impression of different types of targets (i.e., envisioned or encountered groups or ind...

For fifty years, the Western world has witnessed a noticeable decrease in overt expressions of prejudice, reflecting evolving social norms, whereby racism is perceived as something immoral and is often illegal. At the same time, it is clear that racist prejudice persists, largely rooted in historical and cultural legacies like colonialism. Because...

Five studies (N = 7,972) validated a brief measure and model of four facets of social evaluation (friendliness and morality as horizontal facets; ability and assertiveness as vertical facets). Perceivers expressed their personal impressions or estimated society’s impression of different types of targets (i.e., envisioned or encountered groups or in...

Research shows that people do not spontaneously show empathy toward stigmatized outgroups, and especially not toward groups lacking both competence and warmth as described in the Stereotype Content Model. However, people do prove capable of empathizing with such targets when required. We hypothesized that this discrepancy is due to a lower motivati...

Conspiracy beliefs entail a scapegoating function by attributing the consequences of crises, such as economic downturns, to the secret action of outgroups. While conspiracy beliefs have been described as reactions to economic threats, we argue that this factor alone is not sufficient. Rather, perceiving one's ingroup as unfairly deprived compared t...

To manage the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) pandemic, governments imposed public health measures requiring considerable effort and behavioral change from citizens. Grounded in self-determination theory, we investigate the relationship between citizens’ motivation for adhering to health-protective behavior and epidemio...

This study follows recent research which has called into question the ubiquity of the backlash effect by either failing to show that individuals sanction counter-stereotypical targets or by showing that they exhibit a preference for counter-stereotypical targets over targets who conform to gender stereotypes (Brenner et al., 2023; Meimoun et al., 2...

We investigate whether people's regulatory mode (assessment and locomotion) and social comparison motives (self‐evaluation vs. self‐enhancement) jointly influence with whom—either a peer or their leader—individuals prefer to compare. In three preregistered studies ( N = 839), we measured participants' chronic regulatory mode and assessed their comp...

We investigate how the complexity of the social environment (more vs. less groups) influences attitude formation. We hypothesize that facing a larger number of groups renders learning processes about these groups noisier and more regressive, which has two important implications. First, more-complex social environments should lead perceivers to unde...

Background People’s perceived risk of being infected and having severe illness was conceived as a motivational source of adherence to behavioral measures during the COVID-19 crisis. Methods We used online self-reported data, spanning 20 months of the COVID-19 crisis in Belgium (n = 221,791; 34.4% vaccinated; July 2020 - March 2022) to study the as...

In spite of the safety and efficiency of the COVID‐19 vaccines and the many promotion efforts of political and expert authorities, a fair portion of the population remained hesitant if not opposed to vaccination. Public debate and the available literature point to the possible role of people's attitudes towards medical institutions as well as their...

Previous research shows that stereotypes can distort the visual representation of groups in a top-down fashion. In the present endeavor, we tested if the compensation effect—the negative relationship that emerges between the social dimensions of warmth and competence when judging two social targets—would bias the visual representations of these tar...

In order to promote their anti-immigration agenda, many politicians resort to gender equality discourse, often suggesting that national or European values should be protected against Islam that subordinates women. This co-occurrence of racist and anti-sexist arguments is striking because research generally shows that people with racist views and lo...

Upon the outbreak of the SARS‐CoV‐2 virus, it was clear that the pandemic would not only entail physical but also psychological challenges and threats to individuals’ sustained motivation, behavioral adherence, and mental health. To encourage the Belgian authorities to take these psychological aspects into account, the Motivation Barometer, a large...

The essential role of the psychological needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness in well‐being has been demonstrated convincingly. Yet whether their fulfillment also serves as a source of resilience in the face of adversity has received limited attention. A longitudinal sample of Belgian citizens ( N = 1869; M age = 56.23, 68% female) comple...

Social judgment maps onto two fundamental dimensions: Warmth and Competence. Although recent social perception work shows that morality and sociability are two facets of Warmth dimension, their respective function remains to be understood. We propose that perceptions of sociability and morality denote two functionally distinct evaluations, i.e., ho...

We reconcile interactive and additive models of category intersection by recasting these theoretical efforts within the conceptual combination framework. In three studies ( N tot = 364), we showed that, in line with an interactive approach, combining ‘elderly men’ with ‘gay men’ generated an atypical subtype with unique attributes that could not be...

Background: The stringency of the measures taken by governments to combat the COVID-19 pandemic varied considerably across countries and time. In the present study, we examined how the proportionality to the epidemiological situation is related to citizens’behavior, motivation and mental health. Methods: Across 421 days between March 2020 and March...

The transmissibility of new COVID-19 variants and decreasing efficacy of vaccines led authorities to recommend a booster and even an annual dose. However, people's willingness to accept new doses varied considerably. Using two independent longitudinal samples of 4596 (Mean age = 53.6) and 514 (Mean age = 55.9) vaccinated participants, we examined h...

To limit the spread of COVID-19, public authorities have recommended sanitary behaviors such as handwashing, mask-wearing, physical distancing, and social distancing. We recruited a large sample of higher education students in Belgium (N = 3201-3441) to investigate the role of sociodemographic variables, mental health, previous COVID-19 infections,...

It is crucial to understand why people comply with measures to contain viruses and their effects during pandemics. We provide evidence from 35 countries ( N total = 12,553) from 6 continents during the COVID-19 pandemic (between 2021 and 2022) obtained via cross-sectional surveys that the social perception of key protagonists on two basic dimension...

Social role theory posits that binary gender gaps in agency and communion should be larger in less egalitarian countries, reflecting these countries’ more pronounced sex-based power divisions. Conversely, evolutionary and self-construal theorists suggest that gender gaps in agency and communion should be larger in more egalitarian countries, reflec...

The goal of this research is to evaluate the effect of priming the knowledge of the social valorization of a certain type of stress beliefs on people's blame judgments about a person in psychological distress at work. Specifically, we want to activate the knowledge that beliefs about either positive or negative consequences of stress (« Stress-is-e...

There is clear evidence that people with mental disability suffer from discrimination at school, at work, and in society. Less is known about the psychological processes and perceptions that guide such behaviors and even less if these perceptions vary according to the type of disability. Our objective was to build on well-established social psychol...

Contemporary approaches of impression formation and stereotypes celebrate the role of the Big Two in social evaluation: the horizontal and vertical dimensions (Abele et al., 2021). Recently, interest has grown in making further distinctions within each of these dimensions (Abele et al., 2008). Here, we focused on the vertical facets, namely, assert...

This vignette-based study examined in a sample of unvaccinated Belgian citizens (N = 1918; Mage = 45.99) how health care workers could foster reflection about and intentions to get vaccinated against COVID-19 by experimentally varying their communication style (i.e., autonomy-supportive vs. controlling) and the reference to external motivators (i.e...

Background: People’s perceived risk to be infected and to have severe illness has been thought as a motivational source of adherence to behavioral measures during the COVID-19 crisis. Methods: We used online self-reported data, spanning 20 months of the COVID-19 crisis in [blinded] (n = 241,275; 34% vaccinated; July 2020 - March 2022). Results: The...

Objective: Across nationwide rollout of COVID-19 vaccination, people in Belgium differed widely in their vaccination intention. In the present study, we examined (a) how people’s vaccination intentions changed during the vaccination rollout and (b) whether changes in motivation (i.e., autonomous, controlled, and distrust-based (a)motivation) predic...

It is crucial to understand why people comply with measures to contain viruses and their effects during pandemics. We provide evidence from 35 countries (Ntotal = 12,553) from six continents during the COVID-19 pandemic that the social perception of key protagonists on two basic dimensions of social perception – warmth and competence – played a cru...

Background: : This vignette study explores which factors contribute to higher COVID-19 vaccination intentions. Methods: : Between the 4th-11th January 2021, we recruited 15,901 Belgian citizens (Mage=50.11 years, range 18-100) through convenience sampling to participate in a vignette study. In each vignette, we manipulated contextual determinant...

Ce symposium réunit des communications qui visent à explorer les dimensions du jugement social à travers les facettes qui les composent. Il s'agira ainsi d'explorer de nouvelles perspectives de recherche sur la perception sociale à travers la présentation d'un panel de travaux s'intéressant aux relations entre les dimensions fondamentales du jugeme...

Objective. Across nationwide rollout of COVID-19 vaccination, people in Belgium differed widely in their vaccination intention. In the present study, we examined (a) how people’s vaccination intentions changed during the vaccination rollout and (b) whether changes in motivation (i.e., autonomous, controlled, and distrust-based (a)motivation) predic...

Visual perspective taking (VPT), the ability to adopt another person's viewpoint, entails two distinct processes, Level‐1 (L1)‐VPT and Level‐2 (L2‐VPT), referring to the ability to perceive whether and how a target sees an object, respectively. Whereas previous efforts investigated the impact of targets' social characteristics on L1‐VPT, the presen...

Rationale Vaccination willingness is a critical step in the effort to reach herd immunity and control the COVID-19 pandemic. Nevertheless, many people remain reluctant to be vaccinated. Objective Integrating the literature on Self-Determination Theory, trust in authorities, and conspiracy theories, this research examines (a) the direct and indirec...

Prior work showed that leadership preferences depend not only on followers’ characteristics, but also on contextual features. We investigated how regulatory mode (assessment – a concern with “getting things right” vs. locomotion – a concern with “getting things done” in goal pursuit) and the definition of quality criteria (i.e. whether or not there...

The present research examined which motivational factors contribute to individuals’ intention to take a vaccine that protects against SARS-CoV-2-virus and their self-reported vaccine uptake several months later. The role of different types of motivation was investigated (i.e., autonomous and controlled regulation) as well as vaccine distrust and ef...

El presente estudio analizó el efecto de la amenaza social, producida a través de una manipulación del estatus socioeconómico, en la Orientación a la Dominancia Social (SDO). Se asignó aleatoriamente una muestra de estudiantes universitarios de clase media/media-alta de una universidad privada de Lima, Perú (n = 58) a una de 2 condiciones experimen...

The present research examined which motivational factors contribute to individuals’ intention to take a vaccine that protects against SARS-CoV-2-virus and their self-reported vaccine uptake several months later. The role of different types of motivation was investigated (i.e., autonomous and controlled regulation) as well as vaccine distrust and ef...

The COVID-19 pandemic has affected the psychological well-being of students. Several stressors (such as socioeconomic and education-related contexts) could influence mental health, as well as individual and relational dimensions. This study proposes to evaluate the predictive effect of these factors on anxiety and depressive symptoms among students...

Being part of an ingroup in order to form a new class, and perceived conflict within the original affiliation. The working hypothesis is that there is a positive correlation between these variables. Two hundred and twenty-four volunteer participants responded to five questionnaires that measured the main variables of this study and supplied feedbac...

People gather information about others along a few fundamental dimensions; their current goals determine which dimensions they most need to know. As proponents of competing social-evaluation models, we sought to study the dimensions that perceivers spontaneously prioritize when gathering information about unknown social groups. Because priorities d...

The literature on the approach/avoidance training (AAT) effect has focused on its evaluative consequences (with approached stimuli evaluated as more positive than avoided ones). Building on a grounded cog-nition framework, we investigated AAT effects on the visual representation of stimuli (here, neutral faces). We formulated specific predictions r...

The reverse correlation (RC) is an innovative method to capture visual mental representations (i.e., classification images, CIs) of social targets that has become increasingly popular in social psychology. Because CIs of high quality are difficult to obtain without a large number of trials, the majority of past research relied on CIs extracted from...

Precarious manhood beliefs portray manhood, relative to womanhood, as a social status that is hard to earn, easy to lose, and proven via public action. Here, we present cross-cultural data on a brief measure of precarious manhood beliefs (the Precarious Manhood Beliefs scale [PMB]) that covaries meaningfully with other cross-culturally validated ge...

This chapter compares five models that analyze social evaluation from the micro, interpersonal to macro, many-group level: the Dual Perspective Model (DPM), Behavioral Regulation Model (BRM), Dimensional Compensation Model (DCM), Stereotype Content Model (SCM), and Agency-Beliefs-Communion (ABC) Model. A proper understanding of social evaluation mu...

Dimensional compensation takes place when perceivers judge one of two social targets higher on one of the two fundamental dimensions while judging the other target higher on the second dimension. Interestingly, the majority of studies on the dimensional compensation effect focused on direct measures, with almost no attempt to rely on more indirect...

How one approaches gender differences in general likely influences the way one handles mixed-gender negotiations. In the present paper, we examine general beliefs on how women negotiators do-as opposed to how they "should"-handle gender in order to increase their chances of success. First, we hypothesised that people's general beliefs would support...

Social evaluation occurs at personal, interpersonal, group, and intergroup levels, with competing theories and evidence. Five models engage in adversarial collaboration, to identify common conceptual ground, ongoing controversies, and continuing agendas: Dual Perspective Model (Abele & Wojciszke, 2007); Behavioral Regulation Model (Leach, Ellemers,...

Body posture influences feelings about the self, but little is known about its impact on social cognition more generally. We apply the Big Two framework (Agency/Competence, Communion/Warmth) and study how body posture influences interpersonal perception in a dyadic interaction. In three experiments, we studied dyads with different body postures (Ex...

In recent years, an important number of studies aimed at levelling the playing field for women and men at the bargaining table. In spite of this, women continue to find themselves largely at a disadvantage when negotiating with a male counterpart. In this review, we focus on a neglected yet potentially important factor contributing to the gender ga...

As proponents of two theories of social evaluation, we disagree whether people spontaneously differentiate societal groups' conservative-progressive beliefs (distinct claim of the agency-beliefs-communion or ABC model) or warmth/communion (distinct claim of the stereotype content model or SCM). Our adversarial collaboration provides one way to reso...

The relationships between subjective status and perceived legitimacy are important for understanding the extent to which people with low status are complicit in their oppression. We use novel data from 66 samples and 30 countries (N = 12,788) and find that people with higher status see the social system as more legitimate than those with lower stat...

Crises in science concern not only methods, statistics, and results but also, theory development. Beyond the indispensable refinement of tools and procedures, resolving crises would also benefit from a deeper understanding of the concepts and processes guiding research. Usually, theories compete, and some lose, incentivizing destruction of seemingl...

One of the two miscomputations identified in the infoVal metric, namely the omission of the k constant, turns out not to be a miscomputation, since the constant was already taken into account by default in the mad() function from R (see https://www.rdocumentation.org/packages/stats/versions/3.6.2/topics/mad).

Research shows that the two fundamental dimensions of warmth and competence often relate negatively in intergroup stereotypes. This ‘compensation effect’ emerges in group and person perception but has never been examined in situations of interpersonal comparisons involving the self as an individual. In three experiments, we adapted the Quiz Master...

Central to human sociality, evaluation occurs at personal, interpersonal, group, and intergroup levels, with competing theories and evidence. Five current social-evaluation models engage here in adversarial alignment, to identify common conceptual ground, ongoing controversies, and continuing agendas for work on social evaluation: Dual Perspective...

Past research showed that people project their goals onto unknown others. The present research investigates whether they also rely on their motivational orientation in terms of regulatory mode (locomotion vs. assessment). In line with work on self‐judgments, a stronger chronic personal focus on locomotion over assessment decreased predictions of ot...

Brinkman et al. (2019) recently introduced an innovative metric—infoVal—to assess the informational value of classification images (CIs) relative to a random distribution. Although this measure constitutes a valuable tool to distinguish random from nonrandom CIs, we identified two noteworthy discrepancies between the mathematical formalization of t...

Emotion is critical for cultural dynamics, that is, for the formation, maintenance, and transformation of culture over time. We outline the component micro- and macro-level processes of cultural dynamics, and argue that emotion not only facilitates the transmission and retention of cultural information, but also is shaped and crafted by cultural dy...

Work on collective action focuses mainly on the perspective of disadvantaged groups. However, the dynamics of social change cannot be fully understood without taking into account the reactions of the members of advantaged groups to collective action by low status groups. In 10 experiments conducted in four different intergroup contexts (N=1349), we...

Theories of social perception argue that there are two underlying dimensions of social judgment, variously labeled competence/agency and warmth/communality. How these relate to each other has been the focus of extensive empirical work with research showing both a ‘halo” relation (targets rated more positively on one dimension are rated more positiv...

To maintain a positive overall view of their group, people judge likeable ingroup members more favourably and deviant ingroup members more harshly than comparable outgroup members. Research suggests that such derogation of deviant ingroup members aims to restore the image of the group by symbolically excluding so-called 'black sheeps'. We hypothesi...

Past research shows that when forming an impression of an interdependent person, perceivers are motivated to look for information relevant to their goals and interests. The present experiments examined what happens after this information-seeking stage and showed that the relevance of the target’s attributes for one’s goals and interests drives warm...

Three experiments examined the reciprocity of evaluative effects following CS-US pairing. In all three experiments, CS evaluations were assimilated to the valence of the US they were paired with (i.e., an evaluative conditioning effect), whereas US evaluations became less extreme (i.e., a US devaluation effect). Of importance, however, US devaluati...

In light of current concerns with replicability and reporting false-positive effects in psychology, we examine Type I errors and power associated with 2 distinct approaches for the assessment of mediation, namely the component approach (testing individual parameter estimates in the model) and the index approach (testing a single mediational index)....

MOOC : Regards croisés sur les migrations Ce cours en ligne croise les regards des anthropologues, démographes, économistes, juristes, psychologues sociaux et sociologues. Inscrivez-vous dès maintenant Description « La migration fait partie de l’ADN de l’humanité. La migration est une réponse normale aux défis économiques, politiques, sociaux et...

« La migration fait partie de l’ADN de l’humanité. La migration est une réponse normale aux défis économiques, politiques, sociaux et environnementaux. Tant qu’il y aura des différentiels de développement et de démocratie sur notre planète, il y aura des mouvements migratoires. » Ces mots sont de François Crépeau, le Rapporteur spécial des Nation...

In two experiments, we tested an account of compensation in intergroup perceptions as the manifestation of social creativity and magnanimity strategies for low- and high-status groups, respectively. For low-status groups, compensation would be a way to enhance self-esteem after a negative comparison. In contrast, for high-status groups, compensatio...

Research shows that the two fundamental dimensions of social perception, warmth and competence, are often negatively related in our perceptions of others, the so-called compensation effect. The current experiments investigate people’s use of such compensation when self-presenting strategically to reach a desired goal. In Experiment 1, participants...

Participation in social movements and collective action depends upon people's capacity to perceive their societal context. We examined this question in the context of Arab Spring revolutions. In a classic theory of revolution highlighting the role of collective emotions, Brinton (1938) claimed that revolutions, far from chaos, proceed in an orderly...

This study explored the effect of essentialist beliefs on the consensus process within a group. Essentialism is the belief in the existence of an essence that underlies a social category (Medin, 1989). Chilean (N = 164) and Belgian (N = 45) university students, selected through accidental sampling, participated in experiments on the search for cons...

Past social projection research has mainly focused on target characteristics as a moderator of projective effects. The current research considers the power of the perceiver and how it affects projection of competence and warmth. In three studies, participants first rated themselves on a list of traits/preferences, then performed a power manipulatio...

Compensation research suggests that when people evaluate their own and another group, the search for positive differentiation fuels the emergence of compensatory ratings on the two fundamental dimensions of social perception, competence and warmth. In two experiments, we tested whether obstacles to positive differentiation on the preferred dimensio...