Tylko niewielka mniejszość badanych Polaków wierzy, że świat społeczny, w którym żyją, jest prawomocny i sprawiedliwy. Zdecydowana większość z nich sądzi, że ludzie zamożni doszli do bogactwa w sposób nieuczciwy i kosztem tych, którym gorzej się wiedzie.

Only a small minority of Poles surveyed believe that the prevailing social order is valid and fair. A clear majority believe that the wealthy must have come into their affluence via dishonest means, at the expense of those who are worse off.

Prof. Bogdan Wojciszke, a top Polish social psychologist, tells us about whether Poles admire success and what factors affect how they perceive successful people.

We define the need for sense-making as the desire to find reliable connections between the objects, situations, and relationships that people encounter. We have proposed and tested that there are possible individual differences in the need for sense-making and that these individual differences are insightful in characterizing individuals and their behaviors. A correlational study (N = 229) showed that need for sense-making was positively related to self-esteem, extroversion, conscientiousness, openness, and sense of control. Additionally, a higher need for sense-making was associated with greater perception of it as an important part of people’s identity. Thus, need for sense-making is relevant to understanding individual differences and can furthermore comprise a significant element of people’s identity. These results break new ground in the study of individual differences in the need for sense-making and can be of great importance in work and organizational psychology.

A large amount of research has shown that there are two types of trait content in social cognition – agency (including competence) and communion (including morality). Because communal traits are more instrumental in locating a person on the approach-avoidance dimension than agentic ones, the former are considered to be relatively more important in person (and group) perception processes. We developed a proposal that this difference in importance extends to spontaneous trait inferences based on the behavior of the perceived person. The hypothesis that trait inferences are stronger in the communal than agentic domain was tested in four experiments (N = 265) using three different methods of studying spontaneous trait inferences (i.e., the cued recall of distractors procedure, the false recognition paradigm, and the lexical decision task). Despite the variation in methods, the studies yielded the same result – spontaneous trait inferences appeared stronger in the communal than agentic domain, but the effect was restricted to the traits of positive rather than negative valence. For the agentic domain the strength of trait inferences remained relatively low, independent of trait valence. Possible reasons for the difference between positive and negative communal traits are discussed.