Introduction to a Festschrift in Honour of Bogdan Wojciszke

This special section of the Social Psychological Bulletin is dedicated to honouring Bogdan’s 70th birthday. Bogdan Wojciszke’s ideas and research have made many fundamental contributions to personality and social psychology. Bogdan’s most recognisable work delineates two fundamental content dimensions of social perception, also called the “Big Two” (Abele & Wojciszke, 2007), the term he popularised with his good friend and academic colleague Andrea Abele-Brehm who opens this special section (2022, this issue). Since the “Big Two” refers to communion and agency, Bogdan Wojciszke was one of the first researchers who suggested that morality dominates impression formation (Wojciszke et al., 1998).

As communion is more critical in impression formation than agency, we will first discuss Bogdan’s communal qualities and later mention Bogdan’s accolades and list his well-known and endless agentic attributes. Bogdan is a very open, thoughtful, and generous scientist and a helpful colleague. He’s very supportive and likes to share his passion and ideas with others. His unique engagement with ideas and the people behind those ideas, and social qualities of being an extra supportive mentor is visible in the sheer number of his Ph.D. students. Bogdan has been a supervisor of over 30 Ph.D. students and inspired a myriad of scientists worldwide. He’s a reliable colleague and often a person who would naturally guide the way for others. He is the one who remains calm in any chaotic circumstances. He is a dedicated supporter who you would dream to have on your side whenever any kind of drama ensues.

Now onto the agentic part of prof. Bogdan Wojciszke’s prolific career – he is currently a full professor at SWPS University of Social Sciences and Humanities in Sopot, a full member of the Polish Academy of Sciences, and an elected fellow of the Association for Psychological Science. He authored over a hundred scientific papers in top psychological journals. He also served as an editor for numerous scientific journals, including the JESP and EJSP. Bogdan Wojciszke has been named a winner of many awards and honours such as the Serge Moscovici Medal (together with Andrea Abele-Brehm), the Prize of the Foundation for Polish Science, Order of Polonia Restituta and an honorary doctorate from the Kazimierz Wielki University to name just a few.

This special section consists of four articles which deal with research ideas related to Bogdan’s work on moral judgments, person perception and social cognition. Andrea Abele Brehm (2022, this issue) opens the section by describing Bogdan as the first researcher who linked agency and communion content dimensions with perspective. Specifically, Bogdan proved that actors see the world from an agentic perspective, while observers’ perspective is more related to communion. This “brilliant idea”, as Andrea writes in her paper, was the opening for the “Dual Perspective Model”.

The second article written by Karg, Lim, and Schnall, (2022, this issue) claims that the more critical and robust an evaluation of a well-known person is, the less they change their impression based on negative information. They found that those who publicly expressed approval of a celebrity before a scandal and expressed a higher general liking for him were more likely to support him after the moral scandal and express adoration and compassion toward him afterwards.

The third paper by Cisłak, Wojcik, and Bialobrzeska (2022, this issue) argues that holding managerial positions is positively associated with endorsing values reflecting personal focus and negatively associated with values reflecting social focus. Based on the data from the European Social Survey 2012 (N = 48,105) they found that on the one hand, managers value self-enhancement and openness to change to more of an extent than non-managers, which confirms that those in managerial positions endorse personal focus. On the other hand, managers value self-transcendence and conservation to a lower extent than non-managers, the evidence of which decreases in a social focus. Interestingly, this effect was mediated by subjective social status and moderated by income inequalities within societies.

And finally, Winkielman and Nowak (2022, this issue) reviewed and examined several empirical and theoretical contributions and concluded that variance of judgments of interpersonal trust depends on the subjective consistency – a sense of fit between individual elements when processing interpersonal information about others. Winkielman and Nowak propose that lack of consistency (predictability, reliability) makes information processing difficult and thus leads to more negative judgments of trust. Following the consequences of their account, Winkielman and Nowak reach an interesting conclusion that in the moral domain, people may experience more "trust" in interactions with predictable enemies, than with unreliable "friends".

Dear Bogdan, we, the authors, the SPB Editors, and the Guest Editors of this section, hope this selection of papers will make for an interesting read. As your co-authors, colleagues, associates, collaborators, and former and current PhD students, we are forever grateful for your time, attention, support and friendship and we are forever in debt to you. Happy birthday Bogdan.