Moral, competent, or sociable? Evaluation of one's own and other nations in the European context.

Recent research has highlighted that three dimensions are relevant for social judgement in the intergroup and political arena: morality, sociability, and competence. Among them, morality is the most important to the positive evaluation of the ingroup. Conversely, competence or sociability are more relevant to the evaluation of outgroups. The present study examines how people judge one’s own nation and other nations. To this aim, we considered an ingroup nation, Italy, which is stereotypically described – by ingroup and outgroup members - as low in morality and competence (e.g., Pew Research Center, 2012; 2013), but high in sociability. Moreover, this study investigated what dimensions predict the evaluation of three outgroups varying in their status within the European context, namely, German, Romanian, and Spanish people. Participants judged Italians as less moral than German or Spanish people, less competent than Germans, but highly sociable. However, both morality and sociability turned out to be important to the positive evaluations of Italians as well as to national identification. Thus, findings revealed a sort of compensation effect, according to which Italians cope with the ingroup negative stereotype by relying on sociability as well as morality as basis for ingroup identification and ingroup positive evaluation. Findings also showed that competence was the main predictor of the positive evaluation of the high status outgroup (Germans), whereas sociability was the most relevant dimension as for the other two nations. Theoretical and political implications of these results for national attitudes and stereotypes will be discussed.