Empathy neglect: reconciling the spotlight effect and the correspondence bias

When people commit an embarrassing blunder, they typically overestimate how harshly they will be judged by others. This tendency can seem to fly in the face of research on the correspondence bias, which has established that observers are, in fact, quite likely to draw harsh dispositional inferences about others. These seemingly inconsistent literatures are reconciled by showing that actors typically neglect to consider the extent to which observers will moderate their correspondent inferences when they can easily adopt an actor's perspective or imagine being in his or her shoes. These results help to explain why actors can overestimate the strength of observers' dispositional inferences even when, as the literature on the correspondence bias attests, observers are notoriously prone to drawing those very inferences.     

Perceiving choice and constraint: the effects of contextual and behavioral cues on attitude attribution

We examined how features of the situation and the target's behavior in the attitude-attribution paradigm may lead observers to infer that the behavior was performed purposefully and how these perceptions may contribute to correspondence bias. Experiment 1 demonstrated that cues suggesting that essay assignment resulted from the target's purposeful action lead to correspondent inferences. When these cues were absent, observers' inferences were not correspondent. Experiment 2 demonstrated that observers are sensitive to cues emitted by the target (facial expressions of delight and disappointment) and that those cues' meaning depends on the context in which they take place. When the essay was freely chosen, the expression had little effect; observers judged that the essay accurately reflected the target's attitudes. When the essay assignment was constrained, observers used the expressions to discount the essay when judging the target's attitudes. We discuss the implications of these findings for the study of correspondent inferences and correspondence bias.     

Person organization with a memory set: are spontaneous trait inferences personality characterizations or behaviour labels?

Recent research on impression formation has demonstrated that perceivers can categorize the action of target actors in terms of the traits that those behaviours represent, and that they do so in a spontaneous fashion, with neither the intent of categorizing nor the awareness of categorizing. This has resulted in a discussion about what these inferences refer to. Are they simple summaries of the behaviour without implications for the personalities of the people enacting those behaviours, or are they inferences about the target's disposition? The current experiment uses a procedure from the person memory literature to establish that these inferences are in fact references to the qualities of the target actors. Set size effects demonstrate that perceivers are organizing their inferred traits in person nodes; the person serves as the superordinate cue to which inferences are attached. This not only provides evidence that inferences formed spontaneously refer to the personality characteristics of the target, but also provides the first evidence of person organization under simple instructions to memorize stimulus information. The implications of the richness of the target information for spontaneously forming person inferences and for person organization in general are discussed.     

Suspicion of ulterior motivation and the correspondence bias

Three studies examined the hypothesis that when perceivers learn of the existence of multiple, plausibly rival motives for an actor's behavior, they are less likely to fall prey to the correspondence bias than when they learn of the existence of situational factors that may have constrained the actor's behavior. In the first 2 studies, Ss who learned that an actor was instructed to behave as he did drew inferences that corresponded to his behavior. In contrast, Ss who were led to suspect that an actor's behavior may have been motivated by a desire to ingratiate (Study 1), or by a desire to avoid an unwanted job (Study 2), resisted the correspondence bias. The 3rd study demonstrated that these differences were not due to a general unwillingness on the part of suspicious perceivers to make dispositional inferences. The implications that these results have for understanding attribution theory are discussed.     

I'll Know What You're Like When I See How You Feel: How and When Affective Displays Influence Behavior-Based Impressions

ABSTRACT— Accumulating evidence suggests that targets' displays of emotion shape perceivers' impression of those targets. Prior research has highlighted generalization effects, such as an angry display prompting an impression of hostility. In two studies, we went beyond generalization to examine the interaction of displays and behaviors, finding new evidence of augmenting effects (behavior-correspondent inferences are stronger when behavior is accompanied by positive affect) and discounting effects (such inferences are weaker when behavior is accompanied by negative affect). Thus, the same display can have different effects on impressions depending on the behavior it accompanies. We found evidence that these effects are mediated by ascribed intentions and that they have a boundary: When behaviors and affective displays are repeated, the augmenting and discounting power of displays appears to wane.     

On the relation between spontaneous trait inferences and intentional inferences: An inference monitoring hypothesis

More than twenty five years after the beginning of research on spontaneous trait inferences (Winter & Uleman, 1984) an intriguing paradox in the impression formation literature remains: if traits are spontaneously inferred, why aren't they used to organize behavioral information and thereby facilitate recall under memory instructions (Hamilton, Katz, & Leirer, 1980)? We hypothesized that organization by traits is more evident under impression formation goals because only in that case then are inferences sufficiently monitored to permit their use in organizing impressions. As a consequence, such monitored traits can then be used strategically as retrieval cues. Merging the main features of the Winter and Uleman and the Hamilton et al. experimental paradigms, Experiment 1 simultaneously replicated the main results of both studies. Using a new recognition paradigm, Experiments 2 and 3 further tested this inference monitoring hypothesis by showing that monitoring of trait inferences only occurs under particular processing goals, and is dependent on the availability of cognitive resources.     

Inferences about actions performed in constraining contexts: Correspondence bias or correspondent inference?

Prior studies of the correspondence bias reveal a tendency for people to base inferences on behaviors they observe, even when these behaviors are highly constrained by the social context in which they occur. Three processes may combine to sustain this effect: (a) an insufficient adjustment of initial estimates caused by the fundamental attribution error (FAE); (b) the reliance on intuitive estimates of the prevalence of traits, attitudes, and other dispositional characteristics in the general population; and (c) the assumption that few situations are so coercive that they negate all freedom of choice. These processes were differentiated in a modification of the Jones-Harris paradigm. Participants estimated a particular attitude's prevalence in the general population before reading an essay written under either high or low choice conditions and taking a probable or improbable position. Inferences were consistent with prior probabilities when the essay expressed a highly probable opinion and consistent with behavior when the essay expressed an unlikely opinion. These results suggest that perceivers make inferences by estimating the probability that the observed behavior reflects a dispositional characteristic and then revising their prior estimates of the probability of that characteristic accordingly. Thanks are extended to William R. Pope for his assistance in all phases of this research, and to Karl Kelley, Joel Cohen, Catherine Lewis, Chris Wetzel, and several anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions.     

Inferences about actions performed in constraining contexts: Correspondence bias or correspondent inference?

Prior studies of the correspondence bias reveal a tendency for people to base inferences on behaviors they observe, even when these behaviors are highly constrained by the social context in which they occur. Three processes may combine to sustain this effect: (a) an insufficient adjustment of initial estimates caused by the fundamental attribution error (FAE); (b) the reliance on intuitive estimates of the prevalence of traits, attitudes, and other dispositional characteristics in the general population; and (c) the assumption that few situations are so coercive that they negate all freedom of choice. These processes were differentiated in a modification of the Jones-Harris paradigm. Participants estimated a particular attitude's prevalence in the general population before reading an essay written under either high or low choice conditions and taking a probable or improbable position. Inferences were consistent with prior probabilities when the essay expressed a highly probable opinion and consistent with behavior when the essay expressed an unlikely opinion. These results suggest that perceivers make inferences by estimating the probability that the observed behavior reflects a dispositional characteristic and then revising their prior estimates of the probability of that characteristic accordingly. Thanks are extended to William R. Pope for his assistance in all phases of this research, and to Karl Kelley, Joel Cohen, Catherine Lewis, Chris Wetzel, and several anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions.     

Inferring the preferences of others from spontaneous, low-emotional facial expressions

The present study investigates whether people can infer the preferences of others from spontaneous facial expressions alone. We utilize a paradigm that unobtrusively records people's natural facial reactions to relatively mundane stimuli while they simultaneously report which ones they find more appealing. Videos were then presented to perceivers who attempted to infer the choices of the target individuals—thereby linking perceiver inferences to objective outcomes. Perceivers demonstrated above-chance ability to infer target preferences across four different stimulus categories: people (attractiveness), cartoons (humor), paintings (decorative appeal), and animals (cuteness). While perceivers' subjective ratings of expressivity varied somewhat between targets, these ratings did not predict the relative “readability” of the targets. The findings suggest that noncommunicative, natural facial behavior by itself suffices for certain types interpersonal prediction, even in low-emotional contexts.     

Theory-based bias correction in dispositional inference: The fundamental attribution error is dead,long live the correspondence bias

Social psychological research has repeatedly shown that perceivers draw correspondent dispositional inferences from observed behaviour even when this behaviour was highly constrained by situational factors (i.e., the correspondence bias). Even though this phenomenon has been proposed to be multiply determined, the most common explanation is still that perceivers ubiquitously consider situational factors to have little impact on human behaviour (i.e., the fundamental attribution error). The present chapter offers a critical analysis of the available empirical evidence on the correspondence bias from the perspective of theory-based bias correction. It is concluded that the correspondence bias results from a number of different processes associated with the application of perceivers' causal theories about situational influences on human behaviour. However, there is no evidence for the assumption that the correspondence bias is due to causal theories implying that situational factors have little impact on human behaviour. Theoretical and empirical implications are discussed.     

How Children and Adults Name Broken Objects: Inferences and Reasoning About Design Intentions in the Categorization of Artifacts

If inferences about the functions intended by object designers guide the way artifacts are categorized, a broken object should still be considered a member of its original category even though it is currently dysfunctional; however, an object that appears to be dysfunctional by design should not be. Such a comparison was arranged in four studies of lexical categorization. Even with novel categories, 10-year-olds and adults preferentially included broken objects, and they did so spontaneously (Study 1). Younger children did not (Studies 1 and 2). However, when probed about the design intentions behind novel objects, 6-year-olds often inferred them correctly and then took intentions into account to categorize (Study 3). In fact, when 4-year-olds named objects derived from familiar categories, even they spontaneously used design intentions to categorize (Study 4). Accordingly, even young children provided some evidence of categorizing artifacts by inferring and reasoning about intended functions.     

Cultural variation in correspondence bias: the critical role of attitude diagnosticity of socially constrained behavior

Upon observing another's socially constrained behavior, people often ascribe to the person an attitude that corresponds to the behavior (called the correspondence bias [CB]). The authors found that when a socially constrained behavior is still diagnostic of the actor's attitude, both Americans and Japanese show an equally strong CB. A major cultural difference occurred when the behavior was minimally diagnostic. Demonstrating their persistent bias toward dispositional attribution, Americans showed a strong CB. But Japanese did not show any CB (Study 1). Furthermore, a mediational analysis revealed that this cross-cultural difference was due in part to the nature of explicit inferences generated online during attitudinal judgment (Study 2). Implications for the cultural grounding of social perception are discussed.     

Noncategorical approaches to feature prediction with uncertain categories

In four experiments, we investigated how people make feature predictions about objects whose category membership is uncertain. Artificial visual categories were presented and remained in view while a novel instance with a known feature, but uncertain category membership was presented. All four experiments showed that feature predictions about the test instance were most often based on feature correlations (referred to as feature conjunction reasoning). Experiment 1 showed that feature conjunction reasoning was generally preferred to category-based induction in a feature prediction task. Experiment 2 showed that people used all available exemplars to make feature conjunction predictions. Experiments 3 and 4 showed that the preference for predictions based on feature conjunction persisted even when category-level information was made more salient and inferences involving a larger number of categories were required. Little evidence of reasoning based on the consideration of multiple categories (e.g., Anderson, (Psychological Review, 98:409–429, 1991)) or the single, most probable category (e.g., Murphy & Ross, (Cognitive Psychology, 27:148–193, 1994)) was found.     

Differences in the Evaluation of Generic Statements About Human and Non‐Human Categories

Generic statements (e.g., “Birds lay eggs”) express generalizations about categories. Current theories suggest that people should be especially inclined to accept generics that involve threatening information. However, previous tests of this claim have focused on generics about non‐human categories, which raises the question of whether this effect applies as readily to human categories. In Experiment 1, adults were more likely to accept generics involving a threatening (vs. a non‐threatening) property for artifacts, but this negativity bias did not also apply to human categories. Experiment 2 examined an alternative hypothesis for this result, and Experiments 3 and 4 served as conceptual replications of the first experiment. Experiment 5 found that even preschoolers apply generics differently for humans and artifacts. Finally, Experiment 6 showed that these effects reflect differences between human and non‐human categories more generally, as adults showed a negativity bias for categories of non‐human animals, but not for categories of humans. These findings suggest the presence of important, early‐emerging domain differences in people's judgments about generics.     

Incidental anger and the desire to evaluate

Our results indicate that people experiencing incidental anger are more likely than people in neutral and other emotional states to prefer to perform evaluative tasks, even though their anger may bias the evaluations they make. Induced anger increased participants’ desire to evaluate others’ ideas (Experiment 1) and made the evaluations of those ideas more negative in valence (Experiment 2). Anger increased the appeal of evaluating ideas when evaluations were expected to be largely negative but not when evaluations were expected to be positive (Experiments 3 and 4). Mediation analyses revealed that this willingness to evaluate when angry stems from a belief that evaluating others can leave angry people in a positive mood. Because people are often free to decide when to perform the tasks required of them, this tendency may have implications for how and when ideas are evaluated.     

Memory Errors Reveal a Bias to Spontaneously Generalize to Categories

Much evidence suggests that, from a young age, humans are able to generalize information learned about a subset of a category to the category itself. Here, we propose that—beyond simply being able to perform such generalizations—people are biased to generalize to categories, such that they routinely make spontaneous, implicit category generalizations from information that licenses such generalizations. To demonstrate the existence of this bias, we asked participants to perform a task in which category generalizations would distract from the main goal of the task, leading to a characteristic pattern of errors. Specifically, participants were asked to memorize two types of novel facts: quantified facts about sets of kind members (e.g., facts about all or many stups) and generic facts about entire kinds (e.g., facts about zorbs as a kind). Moreover, half of the facts concerned properties that are typically generalizable to an animal kind (e.g., eating fruits and vegetables), and half concerned properties that are typically more idiosyncratic (e.g., getting mud in their hair). We predicted that—because of the hypothesized bias—participants would spontaneously generalize the quantified facts to the corresponding kinds, and would do so more frequently for the facts about generalizable (rather than idiosyncratic) properties. In turn, these generalizations would lead to a higher rate of quantified‐to‐generic memory errors for the generalizable properties. The results of four experiments (N = 449) supported this prediction. Moreover, the same generalizable‐versus‐idiosyncratic difference in memory errors occurred even under cognitive load, which suggests that the hypothesized bias operates unnoticed in the background, requiring few cognitive resources. In sum, this evidence suggests the presence of a powerful bias to draw generalizations about kinds.     

Children's category‐based inferences affect classification

Children learn many new categories and make inferences about these categories. Much work has examined how children make inferences on the basis of category knowledge. However, inferences may also affect what is learned about a category. Four experiments examine whether category‐based inferences during category learning influence category knowledge and thereby affect later classifications for 5‐ to 7‐year‐olds. The children learned to classify pictures of new types of creatures on the basis of a salient feature (colour) and then answered a question that required them to make an inference on the basis of other features. At test, children classified pictures that included only some features (without colour). Experiment 1 showed that the features relevant to the inference during learning led to better classification than did features irrelevant to the inference. Experiment 2 replicated this finding even when the relevant features were physically close to the irrelevant features. Experiments 3 and 4 found this effect even when the classification was learned prior to the inference task and even when no mention was made of the categories during inference learning. Taken together, these results show that making inferences during category learning can influence category knowledge and suggest a need to integrate the work on category learning and category‐based inferences.     

What will Phil do next? : Spontaneously inferred traits influence predictions of behavior

Past research has shown that perceivers intentionally may make trait inferences about others and use this information to make predictions about these others' future behaviors. Other research has also shown that people can make trait inferences without intent—that is, spontaneously. However, one unexplored avenue is whether spontaneous trait inferences (STI), affect how perceivers predict others' will behavior. Three studies explored this issue. Results from Studies 1 and 2 showed that: (1) exposure to trait-implicative behaviors describing an actor influences subsequent behavior predictions made about the actor in a trait-consistent manner, and (2) predictions occurred regardless of behavior recall, implying that the behavior predictions were derived from prior trait inferences and not from behavior recall. Results from Study 3 bolstered this conclusion by showing that behavior predictions were similar regardless of whether subjects were explicitly instructed to make inferences or not, but that a manipulation known to interfere with inference generation (lie detection instructions) muted behavior predictions. Results from Study 3 also suggested that the prediction effects had both automatic and controlled components, and that reductions observed in the lie detection condition of Study 3 were caused by alterations in the automatic influence of trait knowledge to the behavior predictions. These results suggest that STI may be causal inferences about the actors' dispositions.     

Action embellishment: an intention bias in the perception of success

Na?ve theories of behavior hold that actions are caused by an agent's intentions, and the subsequent success of an action is measured by the satisfaction of those intentions. However, when an action is not as successful as intended, the expected causal link between intention and action may distort perception of the action itself. Four studies found evidence of an intention bias in perceptions of action. Actors perceived actions to be more successful when given a prior choice (e.g., choose between 2 words to type) and also when they felt greater motivation for the action (e.g., hitting pictures of disliked people). When the intent was to fail (e.g., singing poorly), choice led to worse estimates of performance. A final experiment suggested that intention bias works independent from self-enhancement motives. In observing another actor hit pictures of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, shots were distorted to match the actor's intentions, even when it opposed personal wishes. Together these studies indicate that judgments of action may be automatically distorted and that these inferences arise from the expected consistency between intention and action in agency.