Navigating the social world: Toward an integrated framework for evaluating self, individuals, and groups.

Each has distinctive focus, theoretical roots, premises, and evidence.Controversies dispute dimensions: number, organization, definition, and labeling; their relative priority; and their relationship.Our first integration suggests 2 fundamental dimensions: Vertical (agency, competence, "getting ahead") and Horizontal (communion, warmth, "getting along"), with respective facets of ability and assertiveness (Vertical) and friendliness and morality (Horizontal).Depending on context, a third dimension is conservative versus progressive Beliefs.Second, different criteria for priority favor different dimensions: processing speed and subjective weight (Horizontal); pragmatic diagnosticity (Vertical); moderators include number and type of target, target-perceiver relationship, context.Finally, the relation between dimensions has similar operational moderators.As an integrative framework, the dimensions' dynamics also depend on perceiver goals (comprehension, efficiency, harmony, compatibility), each balancing top-down and bottom-up processes, for epistemic or hedonic functions.One emerging insight is that the nature and number of targets each of these models typically examines alters perceivers' evaluative goal and how bottom-up information or top-down inferences interact.This framework benefits theoretical parsimony and new research.