Competent Friends, Friendly Foes: A Conjoint Experiment of How Affective Polarization Govern the Relative Weight of Warmth and Competence in Candidate Evaluations

While studies consistently demonstrate that warmth and competence judgments are vital to understanding how voters perceive and react to political candidates (e.g., Bittner, 2011; Ferreira da Silva & Costa, 2019), we know little about the conditions that govern the relative weight voters attribute to these dimensions. This paper builds on socio-psychological literature and argues that it is rational for voters to avoid harmful intentions by prioritizing warmth judgments. However, ingroup favoritism stemming from affective polarization can alter the primacy of warmth and reinforce the impact of stereotypical perceptions of gender. According to the stereotype content model (SCM), evolutionary pressures immediately evoke humans to answer two fundamental questions in social cognition (Fiske et al., 2007). First, whether the other's intentions threaten them or their group, resulting in a valence judgment of warmth. Second, whether the other can enact their intentions, resulting in a competence judgment that guides the intensity of the first impression. Warmth judgments precede competence, reflecting the inherent self-interest in avoiding threatening behavior (Fiske et al., 2007). However, not all people are perfect strangers, and we often enter evaluative processes with preconceptions that can alter the primacy of warmth judgment. First, social identity theory (Tajfel, 1978) ascribes how we construct our identity as group members and constantly engage in social sorting in ingroups and outgroups, impacting our attitudes and behavior toward others. Second, social role theory (Eagly, 1987) attributes social norms to give rise to stereotypical perceptions of gender that associate women with warmth and men with competence. This paper argues that these theories can shed light on how affective polarization affects the psychological mechanisms governing how voters perceive and react to political candidates. Affective polarization refers to people adopting partisanship as a social identity and engaging in partisan sorting in ingroups and outgroups based on partisan affiliation (Iyengar, 2022). First, the paper hypothesizes that affective polarization can alter the primacy of warmth judgment when voters evaluate co-partisans as positive bias entails trust regarding their candidate's intentions. Conversely, negative bias toward outgroup candidates should fortify incentives to avoid threats to self-interest and reinforce the significance of warmth judgment when evaluating candidates from an opposing party. Second, the paper expects gender stereotypes that associate women with warmth and men with competence to function as heuristics for affective polarized voters when evaluating candidates with different partisan affiliations. The incentives to prioritize friendly intentions of opposing candidates should favor female candidates, whereas voters should prefer male candidates as co-partisans due to their presumed competence. The paper outlines a conjoint experiment investigating how affective polarization moderates voters' trade-offs between personality traits, partisan affiliation, and gender in evaluating and selecting political candidates. In light of these considerations, this study seeks to contribute theoretical insights and practical implications to the intricate interplay governing how voters think and act politically.