Perspectives of agent and recipient: Beyond the dichotomy

Until recently, research on action control and on the content of social information processing formed quite distant, separate domains of psychological inquiry. The work of Wojciszke and Baryła provides a highly promising attempt of bridging these two fields of investigation. In particular, they hypothesize (and present compelling evidence in support of the idea) that being in a position of the agent of a goal-directed activity strongly promotes access to ability categories, whereas being in a position of a recipient of another person's intended action strongly promotes access to communal (e.g. interpersonal) categories. In my comment I address three questions. First, I propose to "go beyond the dichotomy" to consider the importance of the position of a neutral (uninvolved) observer. In contrast to agent and recipient, the neutral observer may be able to engage in more complex and less biased processing of social information. Second, I suggest that not only position in an interaction, but also the content of the goal matters: It seems reasonable to assume that an agent with a pro-social goal will have at least partial access to communal categories. Finally, I suggest that the communal perspective - considered by the Authors as a unified entity - may actually be comprised of two distinct qualities: interpersonal content and intergroup content. So far, the research of Wojciszke and Baryła has been focused on the interpersonal, not intergroup perspective. peerReviewed publishedVersion