Respect

Abstract

Respect is a type of attitude: an evaluative orientation that the Medical Subject Headings vocabulary defines as both admiration for abilities or achievements and regard for the feelings, wishes, and rights of others. That double definition mirrors the field's central distinction, drawn by the philosopher Stephen Darwall, between recognition respect, owed to every person simply as a person, and appraisal respect, earned by merit. Psychology has taken up the distinction empirically, showing they are separable with different consequences. In groups, feeling respected signals status and inclusion, which the group engagement model treats as the engine of identification and cooperation; equality-based respect, the sense of being treated as a full and equal member, predicts autonomy and a sense of being fully human. This article covers what respect is, its two kinds, and equality-based respect, with a worked example and three demonstrations.

Keywords: respect, recognition respect, appraisal respect, group engagement

To respect something is to regard it as making a claim on how one may act. The claim can be earned, as when one respects a colleague for the quality of their work, or it can be unconditional, as when one respects a stranger's rights simply because they are a person. These are different enough that ordinary language uses one word for two attitudes, and much of the psychology of respect consists of keeping them apart and tracing their separate effects. Respect matters because it is the currency of standing: whether a person feels respected tells them where they stand with others, and that appraisal shapes how they cooperate, whether they identify with a group, and how they regard themselves.

This article treats respect as a measurable social-cognitive construct. It defines respect as an evaluative attitude and distinguishes the two kinds that run through the literature, sets out how respect operates within groups as a signal of status and inclusion, examines equality-based respect and its consequences for autonomy and cooperation, and works through the scoring of a respect scale. The organizing claim is that respect is not a single diffuse sentiment but a structured family of attitudes whose components can be measured separately and predict distinct outcomes.

What Respect Is

Respect is an evaluative attitude: a settled way of regarding someone or something as warranting a certain kind of treatment. The Medical Subject Headings vocabulary captures the construct's two faces in a single definition — a feeling of deep admiration elicited by another's abilities, qualities, or achievements, together with regard for the feelings, wishes, and rights of others — and files respect as a type of attitude, reflecting its status as a stable orientation rather than a passing emotion. What makes respect a cognitive construct rather than a mere feeling is that it is organized around a judgment about its object: one respects a person for something, or as something, and that appraisal governs how one is prepared to act toward them.

The clinical tradition supplies the limiting case. Carl Rogers argued that therapeutic change depends on unconditional positive regard — a non-contingent valuing of the client as a person, offered without reference to whether their conduct earns it (Rogers, 1957). That is respect stripped of any appraisal: it is directed at the person as such, not at their qualities. Most everyday respect, by contrast, is thoroughly appraisive, tracking competence, character, or achievement. Holding these two senses apart is the first task of any account of respect, and it is the distinction to which the next section turns.

Two Kinds of Respect: Recognition and Appraisal

The foundational move in the modern study of respect was philosophical. Stephen Darwall distinguished recognition respect from appraisal respect (Darwall, 1977). Recognition respect is the disposition to give appropriate weight to some feature of its object in deciding how to act; in the case of persons, it is owed to every person equally, simply in virtue of their being a person, and consists in taking their standing, rights, and interests as constraints on one's conduct. This side of the distinction descends from Kant's principle that persons are owed regard as ends in themselves and never merely as means, which Darwall recast as a distinct attitude rather than a feeling (Darwall, 1977). Appraisal respect, by contrast, is a positive appraisal of a person's merits — their skill, integrity, or character — and so is earned, varies by degree, and is not owed to everyone. One can have recognition respect for a person one holds in low appraisal respect, taking their rights perfectly seriously while judging their conduct poorly, which shows the two are distinct attitudes rather than two intensities of one.

The distinction has proved durable because it tracks two genuinely different psychological relations. Appraisal respect is a form of positive evaluation, close to admiration, and rises and falls with evidence about its object. Recognition respect is closer to acknowledgment: it is the stance of treating someone as a bearer of claims, and its opposite is not low regard but disregard — treating them as if their interests did not count. Michael Lalljee and colleagues developed the recognition side into an account of unconditional respect for persons, an attitude of regard extended to all people independent of their qualities, and showed it to be associated with tolerance and with a disposition to treat others justly (Lalljee et al., 2007). The first demonstration lets the reader sort statements into recognition and appraisal respect.

Each statement expresses one of Darwall's two kinds of respect. Recognition respect is owed to every person as a person; appraisal respect is a positive evaluation of merit and must be earned. Classify each one; the demo marks it immediately.

The split is robust: a person can be high on one kind and low on the other, which is why recognition and appraisal respect are measured as separate attitudes rather than as one quantity.

Respect in Groups: Status and Inclusion

When the object of respect is a group member and the source is the group, respect becomes a signal of standing. The group engagement model of Tom Tyler and Steven Blader holds that people care about how they are treated by groups because the treatment tells them about their status within the group and their inclusion in it; respectful treatment communicates that one is a valued, full member, and this information drives identification with the group and the willingness to cooperate with it (Tyler & Blader, 2003). On this account the procedural fairness people are known to prize is valued largely because fair treatment is respectful treatment: it carries the relational message that one belongs and matters.

Empirical work has filled in the model. David De Cremer and Tyler showed that being respected bears on two distinct concerns of group membership — inclusion, the sense of being accepted, and reputation, the sense of being well regarded — and that respect raises cooperation partly by satisfying the need to belong (De Cremer & Tyler, 2005). Yuen Huo and colleagues brought the sources of respect together in an integrative model, distinguishing respect based on group-specific competence from respect based on treatment as a person, and linking being respected to greater social engagement and well-being (Huo et al., 2010). The counterpart finding is that disrespect is experienced as injustice: Dale Miller argued that many reactions we describe as responses to unfairness are at root responses to the disrespect the unfair treatment conveys (Miller, 2001). The second demonstration shows how respect received feeds identification and cooperation in the group engagement model.

In the group engagement model, respectful and procedurally fair treatment tells a member about their status and inclusion in the group. That felt standing raises identification with the group, which in turn drives cooperation. Move the inputs and watch the downstream outcomes follow.

The outcomes are monotone in the inputs: more respectful treatment always raises standing, identification, and cooperation, never lowers them. The indices are illustrative and show the model's direction, not fitted effect sizes.

Equality-Based Respect

A distinct strand, developed by Bernd Simon, Daniela Renger, and colleagues, isolates equality-based respect: respect directed at a person as an equal, independent of their particular achievements or group-specific merits. This is recognition respect given an operational, measurable form within groups. Simon and Stefan Stürmer showed that respect accorded to group members — being treated as a full and equal participant — raised collective identification and group-serving behavior over and above the members' satisfaction with the group (Simon & Stürmer, 2003). The effect ran through respect as acknowledgment of equal standing, not through liking or approval.

Renger and colleagues extended equality-based respect to consequences beyond the group. Being respected as an equal predicts a sense of autonomy — the experience of having standing to think and act on one's own terms — which the authors argue is a social achievement conferred by recognition rather than a purely private trait (Renger et al., 2017). More strikingly, the absence of equality-based respect is tied to feeling less than fully human: when people are treated as less equal within a group, they report a diminished sense of their own humanness, linking disrespect to the psychology of dehumanization (Renger et al., 2016). The construct has also been taken up in organizational research, where Niels Van Quaquebeke and Tilman Eckloff defined and measured respectful leadership (Van Quaquebeke & Eckloff, 2010) and Steven Grover mapped the several meanings respect carries in the workplace (Grover, 2014). The third demonstration places recognition and appraisal respect on independent axes to show their orthogonality.

Rate each item from 1 to 7. The recognition subscale asks whether you are treated as a full and equal member; the appraisal subscale asks whether your merit is admired. Each subscale is scored by its mean, and the point is plotted in the two-dimensional space to show that the two vary independently.

Person A sits high on recognition and low on appraisal (6.33, 2.33); Person B is the mirror image (2.67, 6.67). A single averaged “respect” score would place both near the middle and hide the difference the two subscales reveal.

Worked Example: Scoring a Respect Scale

Consider an illustrative respect scale administered to two members of a project team. It has two subscales of three items each, every item rated from 1 (strongly disagree) to 7 (strongly agree). The recognition subscale asks whether the member feels treated as a full and equal participant whose standing is acknowledged regardless of their output ('My contributions are treated as legitimate'; 'I am included as a full member'; 'My views are given a fair hearing'). The appraisal subscale asks whether the member feels admired for the quality of their work ('My skills are held in high regard'; 'People value my expertise'; 'My work is seen as excellent'). Each subscale is scored by its mean, so each ranges from 1 to 7, and the two are scored separately because recognition and appraisal respect are distinct attitudes, not two ends of one scale (Darwall, 1977). The items here are original and illustrative, not a published instrument.

- Person A is a newcomer: recognition items rated 6, 7, 6; appraisal items rated 2, 3, 2. - Person B is a veteran specialist: recognition items rated 3, 2, 3; appraisal items rated 7, 6, 7.

Person A's recognition items sum to `6 + 7 + 6 = 19`, a mean of `19 / 3 = 6.33`, while their appraisal items sum to `2 + 3 + 2 = 7`, a mean of `7 / 3 = 2.33`: A feels fully included as an equal but not yet admired for their contributions, a recognition-minus-appraisal gap of `6.33 − 2.33 = 4.00`. Person B is the mirror image: recognition items `3 + 2 + 3 = 8`, mean `8 / 3 = 2.67`, and appraisal items `7 + 6 + 7 = 20`, mean `20 / 3 = 6.67`, an appraisal-minus-recognition gap of `6.67 − 2.67 = 4.00`. The specialist is prized for expertise yet feels like an outsider. Because the two subscales move in opposite directions across these people, a single overall 'respect' score would average the gap away and hide exactly what matters; scoring recognition and appraisal separately preserves the distinction that Darwall drew and that the demonstrations make visible (Darwall, 1977; Huo et al., 2010).

Discussion

The study of respect is the study of how an attitude toward a person's standing becomes a cause of how they cooperate, identify, and regard themselves. The construct began with a philosophical distinction — Darwall's recognition versus appraisal respect — and matured into a body of empirical work that treats the two as measurable and traces their separate consequences (Darwall, 1977). The decisive step was relational: Tyler and Blader's group engagement model reframed respect not as private admiration but as information about status and inclusion, which is why respectful treatment predicts cooperation and identification so reliably (Tyler & Blader, 2003; De Cremer & Tyler, 2005).

What the mature construct shows is that respect is structured and consequential rather than diffuse. Equality-based respect predicts autonomy and, in its absence, a diminished sense of one's own humanness (Renger et al., 2017; Renger et al., 2016); being respected raises social engagement and well-being (Huo et al., 2010); and disrespect is experienced as injustice (Miller, 2001). The open problems are those of any construct built on self-report and correlation. Much of the evidence is cross-sectional, so the causal claim — that being respected produces cooperation and well-being rather than merely accompanying them — still needs longitudinal and experimental support. The relation between the philosophical distinction and the measured subscales is only partly mapped, and respect's close relatives — self-respect, which Clucas has distinguished from self-esteem (Clucas, 2020), and the respect that sustains close relationships (Hendrick et al., 2011) — are studied with partly separate vocabularies that have yet to be fully integrated.

Cognitive Implications

Respect is a clean example of how an evaluative attitude functions as a social signal that the mind reads and acts on. In the group engagement model, a person treats the respect they receive as diagnostic information: it answers the questions 'What is my status here?' and 'Do I belong?', and the answers set whether the person invests in the group or withdraws from it (Tyler & Blader, 2003). Respect thus links a perception — how one is treated — to an identity and a behavior, which is the kind of mechanistic chain social cognition seeks to specify.

The recognition–appraisal distinction adds a second lesson for the study of social judgment. Because the two attitudes are separable, a person can be high on one and low on the other, and the consequences differ: recognition respect, or its absence, bears on inclusion, autonomy, and the sense of being human, whereas appraisal respect tracks admiration and the status that competence confers (Renger et al., 2016; Huo et al., 2010). Treating respect as a single quantity, as everyday language invites, would collapse this structure. The lesson for cognitive psychology is that a folk concept can conceal a real componential structure, and that measuring the components separately is what lets their distinct causal roles become visible.

Current Directions

The most active recent work has pushed equality-based respect toward its consequences for the self. Renger and colleagues established that being respected as an equal confers a sense of autonomy, recasting autonomy as something socially granted through recognition rather than a purely individual capacity, and gave the construct a validated measure (Renger et al., 2017). The same group linked the denial of equal respect to a reduced sense of one's own humanness, connecting the psychology of respect to research on dehumanization and showing that disrespect does not merely lower mood but touches how fully human people feel (Renger et al., 2016). These findings have sharpened a causal question — whether changing how respected people feel changes their autonomy and self-regard — rather than settling it.

A second direction concerns self-respect. Claudine Clucas showed that self-respect is empirically distinguishable from self-esteem: self-respect tracks living up to one's standards and being treated, by oneself and others, as worthy of moral regard, whereas self-esteem tracks global self-evaluation (Clucas, 2020). The distinction matters because the two have different sources and may support different outcomes, and it extends the recognition–appraisal structure inward, to the respect a person holds for themselves. Alongside this, the measurement of respect in applied settings — respectful leadership and the meanings of respect at work — continues to develop instruments that let organizations track respect as they would any other climate variable (Van Quaquebeke & Eckloff, 2010; Grover, 2014). The convergence of a sharpened construct, validated measures, and a plausible causal role keeps respect an active research front.

Common Misconceptions

Respect is a single thing that is either present or absent.

No. At least two distinct attitudes go by the name: recognition respect, owed to every person as a person, and appraisal respect, earned by merit. One can take a person's rights fully seriously while judging their conduct poorly, which shows the two are separable (Darwall, 1977).

Respect has to be earned.

Only appraisal respect is earned. Recognition respect is owed unconditionally, in virtue of a person's standing as a person; the clinical idea of unconditional positive regard and the account of unconditional respect for persons both describe respect given independent of merit (Rogers, 1957; Lalljee et al., 2007).

Caring about respectful treatment is just vanity.

No. In the group engagement model, people attend to how respectfully they are treated because the treatment carries information about their status and inclusion in the group, which guides whether they identify with and cooperate with it. It is diagnostic, not merely flattering (Tyler & Blader, 2003).

Self-respect is the same as self-esteem.

No. Self-respect tracks living up to one's standards and being worthy of moral regard, whereas self-esteem is a global self-evaluation. Research has shown the two to be empirically distinguishable, with different sources (Clucas, 2020).

Glossary

Appraisal respect.

Respect as a positive evaluation of a person's merits, such as skill, character, or achievement; it is earned, varies by degree, and is not owed to everyone.

Attitude.

A stable evaluative orientation toward an object or class of objects; in the Medical Subject Headings vocabulary respect is classified as a type of attitude.

Dehumanization.

The perception or treatment of a person or group as less than fully human; the denial of equality-based respect is associated with a diminished sense of one's own humanness.

Disrespect.

Treatment that denies a person's standing or merits; often experienced as injustice, and the counterpart whose absence much respect research measures.

Equality-based respect.

Respect directed at a person as an equal, independent of their particular achievements; the operationalized, measurable form of recognition respect within groups.

Group engagement model.

Tyler and Blader's theory that respectful, fair treatment signals status and inclusion within a group, which drives identification and cooperation.

Procedural justice.

The perceived fairness of the processes by which decisions are made; valued in part because fair treatment is respectful treatment that conveys standing.

Recognition respect.

Respect owed to every person simply as a person, consisting in giving due weight to their standing, rights, and interests in deciding how to act.

Respect.

An evaluative attitude of regard toward a person, group, or thing; it spans admiration elicited by merit and regard for others' standing, feelings, and rights.

Respectful leadership.

A leadership style defined and measured by the respect a leader accords followers; studied as a trackable organizational variable.

Self-respect.

The respect a person holds for themselves, tracking living up to one's standards and being worthy of moral regard; empirically distinguishable from self-esteem.

Status.

A person's standing or rank within a group; respectful treatment communicates high status and thereby raises identification and cooperation.

Unconditional positive regard.

Carl Rogers's term for a non-contingent valuing of a person offered without reference to whether their conduct earns it; respect stripped of appraisal.

Unconditional respect for persons.

An attitude of regard extended to all people independent of their qualities; the recognition side of respect, associated with tolerance and just treatment.

Key Researchers

Stephen L. Darwall

(Yale University). Moral philosopher whose distinction between recognition respect, owed to all persons, and appraisal respect, earned by merit, is the conceptual foundation of the psychological literature on respect. Faculty · Wikipedia

Yuen J. Huo

(University of California, Los Angeles). Social psychologist whose integrative model of respect distinguished its sources and linked respectful treatment to social engagement and well-being. Faculty · ORCID

Daniela Renger

(Kiel University). Social psychologist whose work connects equality-based respect to autonomy, perceived humanness, and standing within groups. Faculty · ORCID

Carl R. Rogers

(University of Wisconsin–Madison; 1902–1987). Founder of client-centered therapy whose concept of unconditional positive regard anchors the clinical sense of respect as a non-contingent valuing of the person. Wikipedia · Wikidata

Bernd Simon

(Kiel University). Social psychologist whose program on respect, equality, and politicized collective identity established equality-based respect as a distinct determinant of group identification and cooperation. Faculty

Tom R. Tyler

(Yale Law School). Procedural-justice researcher whose group engagement model treats respectful treatment as the signal of status and inclusion that drives identification and cooperation with groups. Faculty · Wikipedia

Frequently Asked Questions

What is respect?

Respect is an evaluative attitude of regard toward a person, group, or thing. The Medical Subject Headings vocabulary defines it as both admiration elicited by another's abilities or achievements and regard for the feelings, wishes, and rights of others, and files it as a type of attitude rather than a passing emotion.

What is the difference between recognition and appraisal respect?

Recognition respect is owed to every person simply as a person and consists in taking their standing and rights seriously; appraisal respect is a positive evaluation of someone's merits and is earned by skill or character. One can hold a person in recognition respect while judging their conduct poorly, which shows the two are distinct (Darwall, 1977).

Does respect have to be earned?

Only appraisal respect is earned. Recognition respect is owed unconditionally, in virtue of a person's standing as a person; both unconditional positive regard in therapy and unconditional respect for persons describe respect given regardless of merit (Rogers, 1957; Lalljee et al., 2007).

Why do people care so much about being treated respectfully?

Because respectful treatment is diagnostic information. In the group engagement model it signals a person's status and inclusion within a group, which determines whether they identify with the group and cooperate with it (Tyler & Blader, 2003).

What is equality-based respect?

It is respect directed at a person as an equal, independent of their particular achievements. As the measurable, within-group form of recognition respect, it predicts collective identification, cooperation, and a sense of autonomy (Simon & Stürmer, 2003; Renger et al., 2017).

How is being disrespected related to injustice?

Closely. Dale Miller argued that many reactions we describe as responses to unfairness are at root responses to the disrespect the unfair treatment conveys, so that disrespect is a core part of the experience of injustice (Miller, 2001).

Is self-respect the same as self-esteem?

No. Self-respect tracks living up to one's standards and being worthy of moral regard, whereas self-esteem is a global self-evaluation. The two have been shown to be empirically distinguishable, with different sources (Clucas, 2020).

Can respect be measured?

Yes. Respect scales quantify how respected a person feels, and can separate recognition from appraisal respect so the two components are tracked independently; validated measures exist for equality-based respect and for respectful leadership (Renger et al., 2017; Van Quaquebeke & Eckloff, 2010).

References