People seek to detect who facilitates and who impedes their goal pursuit. The resulting relevance appraisals of opportunity and threat, respectively, can strongly shape subsequent social judgment and behavior. However, important questions about the nature of relevance appraisals remain unanswered: Are relevance appraisals unidimensional or multidimensional? Are people evaluated as generally posing opportunities and/or threats, or as dynamically relevant depending on perceiver goals? We test two hypotheses. First, we propose that opportunity and threat are appraised independently, rather than as endpoints of a single dimension. If so, then others can be evaluated as (a) facilitating a goal, (b) impeding a goal, (c) both facilitating and impeding a goal, or (d) neither facilitating nor impeding a goal. Second, we hypothesize that relevance appraisals shift dynamically with perceiver goals. For example, a single person may be appraised as facilitating one's mate-seeking goal, but as neither facilitating nor impeding one's self-protection goal. In two studies, participants rated the extent to which a variety of targets (e.g., a doctor, a 5-year-old child) pose threats and opportunities to different goals. Confirmatory factor analyses support both hypotheses. We also explore relationships between the Relevance Appraisal Matrix and the stereotype content (Fiske et al., 2002) and ABC (Koch et al., 2016) models of stereotypes, finding evidence that relevance appraisals are distinct from stereotypes of group attributes. In sum, we provide a framework for understanding the structure of relevance appraisals: A central and consequential, yet dynamic and relatively understudied, aspect of social cognition. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

中文翻译：

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相关性评估矩阵：评估他人的相关性。

人们试图发现谁促进了他们的目标追求，谁阻碍了他们的目标追求。由此产生的对机会和威胁的相关性评估可以强烈影响随后的社会判断和行为。然而，关于相关性评估本质的重要问题仍未得到解答：相关性评估是单维的还是多维的？人们被评估为通常会带来机会和/或威胁，还是根据感知者的目标动态相关？我们检验两个假设。首先，我们建议机会和威胁是独立评估的，而不是作为单一维度的端点。如果是这样，那么其他人可以被评估为 (a) 促进目标，(b) 阻碍目标，(c) 促进和阻碍目标，或 (d) 既不促进也不阻碍目标。第二，我们假设相关性评估会随着感知者目标而动态变化。例如，一个人可能被评价为促进了一个人的求偶目标，但既不促进也不妨碍一个人的自我保护目标。在两项研究中，参与者对各种目标（例如，医生、5 岁儿童）对不同目标构成威胁和机会的程度进行了评估。验证性因素分析支持这两种假设。我们还探索了相关性评估矩阵与刻板印象内容（Fiske 等人，2002 年）和 ABC（Koch 等人，2016 年）模型之间的关系，发现相关性评估与群体属性的刻板印象不同的证据。总而言之，我们提供了一个理解相关性评估结构的框架：然而，社会认知的动态和相对未充分研究的方面。（PsycInfo 数据库记录 (c) 2021 APA，保留所有权利）。