Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin

Trope, Yaacov; Higgins, E. Tory; Kruglanski, Arie W.

doi: 10.1177/0146167293195001pmid: N/A

Trope, Yaacov; Higgins, E. Tory

doi: 10.1177/0146167293195002pmid: N/A

The articles in this issue address three sets of questions: How do percievers draw dispositional inferences? What is being inferred? And when do perceives engage in dispositional inference? 'How "questions concern process issues, such as the encoding of behavioral data, the inferential calculi applied to the data, and, more generally, the different ways in which dispositional inferences can be made. 'What" questions concern content issues, such as whether perceivers conceive of dispositions as causal entities or mere descriptors of behavior, as temporally stable or unstable, as context dependent or independent, and as entailing an interpersonal or an intrapersonal standard of comparison. 'When " questions concern the condition under which perceivers engage in dispositional inference: Do perceivers spontaneously engage in dispositional inferences? To what extent do perceivers' informational goals and their conceptions of dispositions influence the likelihood of engaging in dispositional inferences?

Hilton, James L.; Fein, Steven; Miller, Dale T.

doi: 10.1177/0146167293195003pmid: N/A

The role of suspicion in the dispositional inference process is examined. Perceivers who are led to become suspicious of the motives underlying a target's behavior appear to engage in more active and thoughtful attributional analyses than nonsuspicious perceivers. Suspicious perceivers resist drawing inferences from a target's behavior that reflect the correspondence bias (or fundamental attribution error), and they consciously deliberate about questions of plausible causes and categorizations of the target's behavior They are, however, quite willing to make strong correspondent inferences about the target if they learn additional contextual information that renders alternative explanations for the target's behavior less plausible. Implications of these findings for current multiple-stage models of the dispositional inference process are discussed, and the need for these and other models to give more consideration to the social nature of social perception is asserted.

Newman, Leonard S.; Uleman, James S.

doi: 10.1177/0146167293195004pmid: N/A

Recent models of dispositional inference highlight the distinction between the role of traits as descriptions of or labels for behavior and their role as inferred attributes of the people emitting those behaviors. The distinction is an important one; studying the interpersonal consequences of trait inferences requires specifying what such inferences are and what they are not. How current models of person memory accommodate the distinction between behavior identifications and trait inferences is examined, and the possible consequences of identifying a person's behaviors (but not necessarily the person) in trait terms are considered. In addition, research is described suggesting that trait identifications of behavior are likely to occur spontaneously (without impression formation goals). Behavior identifications are essentially incomplete trait inferences, but they have subtle and important effects on subsequent social inference and behavior:

Read, Stephen J.; Miller, Lynn C.

doi: 10.1177/0146167293195005pmid: N/A

A model is presented of how people construct coherent representations of others. It integrates work on knowledge representations with Kintsch's construction-integration model of discourse comprehension and Thagard's model of explanatory coherence. A major claim is that parallel constraint satisfaction processes, fundamental to connectionist modeling, play a major role in the development of coherent representations. Several topics are examined: (a) the role of making goal inferences in trait inferences, (b) how people combine apparently inconsistent traits to arrive at a coherent impression, and (c) how this parallel process model can account for findings that have been given a serial interpretation in Trope's two-stage model of dispositional inference and Gilbert's work on cognitive busyness. It is argued that this model provides a more parsimonious but broader explanation for attributions than alternatives.

Baron, Reuben M.; Misovich, Stephen J.

doi: 10.1177/0146167293195006pmid: N/A

A direct perception analysis of dispositional knozwng, based on an ecological approach that is grounded in the use of activity to get mind into the world, is presented. It is proposed that social dispositions such as dominance or cooperativeness can be directly perceived, as opposed to inferred, if they are embodied in relational activities that activate the disposition. The choice of the particular activity as a way of turning dispositions into perceivable social affordances is related to an evolutionarily oriented analysis of dispositions as evolved adaptive solutions for solving basic social problems such as mate selection and group formation. Objections to the possibility of direct perception that are based on claims of insufficient or deceptive information are countered by the introduction of event-activity tests, modeled after perturbation and bifurcation processes in dynamic systems formulations. Comparisons are then made between the ecological claims of realism, mutualism, and activity and aspects of current constructive models of dispositional knowing, such as Wright and Mischel's conditional hedge model and Trope's Bayesian inference approach.

Trope, Yaacov; liberman, Akiva

doi: 10.1177/0146167293195007pmid: N/A

According to Trope's model, dispositional judgment results from two stages, behavior identification and dispositional inference. This article first reviews research on factors affecting behavior identification-behavior ambiguity, the order of situational and behavioral information, and awareness of alternative meanings of behavior-and then develops the dispositional inference stage theoretically. At this stage, perceivers evaluate the hypothesis that a target's disposition corresponds to his or her identified behavior by assessing an identified behavior's diagnosticity and integrating it with prior information. Diagnosticity derives from causal models of how situations affect individuals of differing dispositions; dispositional hypotheses may be evaluated systematically or heuristically. 7he analysis is then applied to intrinsic and extrinsic inducements, to state and trait inference, and to causal and noncausal (descriptive) inference.

Weisz, Carolyn; Jones, Edward E.

doi: 10.1177/0146167293195008pmid: N/A

To explore differences between target-based expectancies, those based on previous behavior, and category-based expectancies, those based on membership in a social category, two studies tested the hypothesis that target and category-based expectancies of equal predictive strength affect dispositional inference differently when disconfirming information is available. Subjects used either category or target-based information to form expectancies of a nonaggressive child and then listened to a tape of the child behaving aggressively. In Experiment 1, target-based expectancies influenced impressions more than category-based expectancies, and in both studies target-based subjects were less confident of their impressions than category-based subjects. Experiment 2 also found that perceivers with target-based expectancies were more like to attribute unexpected behavior to an unusual mood state than perceivers with category-based expectancies. Results suggest differences in the underlying structures of the two types of expectancies.

Shoda, Yuichi; Mischel, Walter

doi: 10.1177/0146167293195009pmid: N/A

In most research on personality inferences, it is assumed that perceivers are guided implicitly by the intuitive, lay counterpart of a global trait theory of personality. This article explores, in contrast, the possibility that perceivers may also be guided by an intuitive version of the cognitive social conception of personality. In this view, personality dispositions are reconceptualized in terms of cognitive social person variables (such as the individuals' stable expectations, goals, and values) whose behavioral manifestation is in the patterns of situation-behavior relations. Inferences about person variables then require information about characteristic patterns of person-situation interactions. Such information is conveyed by the individual's stable pattern of behavior variations over situations (person does A when X but B when 19-data that typically are available to perceivers in everyday life but seldom in research on personality inferences. The authors examine when and how perceivers focus on these more contextualized, interactive, nontrait qualities of personality that go beyond the constraints of the classic trait conception and explore the implications for theory and research on dispositional inferences.

Reeder, Glenn D.

doi: 10.1177/0146167293195010pmid: N/A

Perceivers hold implicit expectations about the range of behavior implied by any given trait. This article distinguishes among four types of traits: capacities, morality traits, attitudes, and frequency based traits. Each type is described as having a unique pattern of trait-behavior relations, and several of these patterns are shown to relate to dispositional inference. The place of trait behavior relations within a general model of dispositional inference is outlined. The model describes a set of antecedents for the correction stage and divides correction into several interrelated operations: retrieval of attribution-relevant information (usually situational information), a decision-making operation in which the relevance of situational factors is considered along with trait-behavior relations, and an adjustment operation.