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The Great Recession widened social‐class divides, so social interactions across gaps in workplace status and in race generally may be more salient and more fraught. Different statuses and races both carry stereotypes that targets know (meta‐perceptions, how they expect to be viewed by the outgroup). In both cross‐status and cross‐race interactions, targets may aim to manage the impressions they create. Reviewing literature and our own recent work invokes (a) the role of the Stereotype Content Model's two dimensions of social perception, namely warmth and competence; (b) the compensation effect, a tendency to tradeoff between them, especially downplaying one to convey the other; and (c) diverging warmth and competence concerns of people with lower and higher status and racial‐group positions. Higher‐status people and Whites, both stereotyped as competent but cold, seek to warm up their image …