Narrative warmth and quantitative competence: Message type affects impressions of a speaker.

Persuasion research often focuses on how source characteristics affect attitude change in response to a message; however, message characteristics may also alter perceptions of the source. The Message-Based Impression Formation effect (M-BIF) suggests that perceivers use features of messages to infer characteristics of the source, and that such inferences may have a variety of consequential outcomes. In particular, the choice of narrative versus statistical evidence may have implications for the perceived warmth and competence of a source. In five experiments, narrative arguments led to greater perceptions of source warmth and statistical arguments led to greater perceptions of source competence. Across the two behavioral studies, a matching effect emerged: participants preferred to work on cooperative tasks with partners who had provided narratives, and competitive tasks with partners who had provided statistical evidence. These results suggest that the evidence type chosen for everyday communications may affect person perception and interpersonal interaction.

Age-moderated effects of consequence and intent information on punishment: an intuitive prosecutorial interpretation.

In responding to wrongdoings, people simultaneously pursue the goals of social control and fairness to the wrongdoer. Social control necessitates stronger weighting of consequences than causes; fairness entails the opposite. The authors hypothesized that the developmental shift from overweighting consequence to overweighting intent when determining levels of punishment illustrates a shift from a default defender of the normative order to a motivated crusader of fairness to the wrongdoer. Thus, punishment should increase slightly for intentional wrongdoings but decrease substantially for accidental wrongdoings as people age. In an experiment on disciplinary action in Singapore, 9-, 13-, and 17-year-olds learned about the consequences of and intentions behind wrongdoings by peers and predicted consistency of the same act in the future, assigned blame to the wrongdoers, and recommended punishment for them. Results supported hypotheses derived from a fair-but-biased-yet-correctible model of intuitive prosecutors.