EN
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 Baryla 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 Baryla has been focused on the interpersonal, not intergroup perspective.