Do you really understand? Achieving accuracy in interracial relationships.

Accurately perceiving whether interaction partners feel understood is important for developing intimate relationships and maintaining smooth interpersonal exchanges. During interracial interactions, when are Whites and racial minorities likely to accurately perceive how understood cross-race partners feel? We propose that participant race, desire to affiliate, and racial salience moderate accuracy in interracial interactions. Examination of cross-race roommates (Study 1) and interracial interactions with strangers (Study 2) revealed that when race is salient, Whites higher in desire to affiliate with racial minorities failed to accurately perceive the extent to which racial minority partners felt understood. Thus, although the desire to affiliate may appear beneficial, it may interfere with Whites' ability to accurately perceive how understood racial minorities feel. By contrast, racial minorities higher in desire to affiliate with Whites accurately perceived how understood White partners felt. Furthermore, participants' overestimation of how well they understood partners correlated negatively with partners' reports of relationship quality. Collectively, these findings indicate that racial salience and desire to affiliate moderate accurate perceptions of cross-race partners-even in the context of sustained interracial relationships-yielding divergent outcomes for Whites and racial minorities. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2015 APA, all rights reserved).

Downplaying Positive Impressions: Compensation Between Warmth and Competence in Impression Management.

The compensation effect demonstrates a negative relationship between the dimensions of warmth and competence in impression formation in comparative contexts. However, does compensation between warmth and competence extend to impression management? Two studies examined whether people actively downplay their warmth in order to appear competent and downplay their competence in order to appear warm. In Studies 1a and 1b, participants selected words pretested to be high or low in warmth and competence to include in an e-mail message to people they wanted to impress. As predicted, participants downplayed their competence when they wanted to appear warm (Study 1a) and downplayed their warmth when they wanted to appear competent (Study 1b). In Studies 2a and 2b, compensation also occurred when participants introduced themselves to another person, as evidenced by the questions they selected to answer about themselves, their self-reported goals, and their open-ended introductions. Compensation occurred uniquely between warmth and competence and not for other dimensions, such as healthiness (Study 2a) and political interest (Study 2b), which suggests that the compensation effect extends beyond a mere zero-sum exchange between dimensions.