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.

On the spontaneity of behaviour categorization and its implications for personality measurement

In the present study 36 university students were asked to read behaviour‐descriptive sentences either under memory instructions or under behaviour‐categorization instructions. It was demonstrated that after reading sentences under memory instructions sentence recall cued by a corresponding trait adjective was better than sentence recall cued by a strong semantic associate of a sentence part. This was found despite the fact that no actors were mentioned in the sentences. This result suggests that the spontaneous encoding of sentences in trait terms during the first stage of processing behavioural information has to be interpreted as the categorization of actions rather than as the attribution of traits to actors. This categorization of a behaviour is less pronounced when it occurs spontaneously than when explicit instructions are given to do so. The impact of the occurrence of spontaneous behaviour categorization on memory‐based seq‐ or other ratings with concrete behaviour‐descriptive items is discussed.

Procedural Efficiency and the Spontaneity of Trait Inference

This experiment examined the effect of practice with behavior-to-trait judgments on spontaneous trait inference. Subjects engaged in two tasks that were presented to them as separate experiments. The first task required subjects to make 200 yes/no judgments involving either behavior-trait inferences or behavior-object inferences. In the second task, subjects were asked to memorize 18 sentences that implied traits. The recall of half the sentences was then cued by the implied traits to assess whether the traits had been inferred spontaneously at encoding. Subjects who had practiced behavior-trait inferences were more likely to make spontaneous trait inferences than subjects who had practiced behavior-object inferences. Spontaneous trait inference was particularly likely following practice with different behaviors and the same trait. These results show that practice with trait inferences contributes to the spontaneity of these inferences.

Spontaneous Trait Inferences: Effects of Recognition Instructions and Subliminal Priming on Recognition Performance

The hypothesis that spontaneous trait inferences occur during encoding of behavioral descriptions was examined. Subjects studied sentences describing actors performing some action that implied a certain personality trait. For the explicit sentences, the trait implied by the action was explicitly stated, whereas for the implicit sentences, the trait was not stated. Subjects were assigned to either the memory or the impression formation condition. In Experiment I a change from fact to inference recognition instructions increased recognition accuracy for implicit trait items under the impression condition but decreased accuracy under the memory condition. In Experiment 2 subliminal presentation of relevant trait primes decreased recognition accuracy for implicit trait items but only under the impression condition. These data suggest that spontaneous trait inferences occur infrequently if at all during the encoding of behavioral descriptions.

Consciousness and Control

As research on unconscious processes in personality and social psychology increases, there is a danger that disparate phenomena will be confused with each other, and that characteristics of particular unconscious processes will be over generalized. In order to reduce this danger, a simple framework for describing unconscious phenomena is presented. It focuses on the related issues of consciousness and control. The framework was developed to clarify the theoretical status of spontaneous trait inferences, so that research is reviewed first. Then the framework is described, applied to spontaneous trait inferences, and further illustrated by using it to characterize automatic construct activation and mindlessness.

Cognitive Social Approach to Dispositional Inferences: What if the Perceiver is a Cognitive Social Theorist?

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.

Do verbs and adjectives play different roles in different cultures? A cross-linguistic analysis of person representation

Five studies are reported testing the hypothesis that Westerners (Italians) rely more on trait adjectives and that East Asians (Japanese) rely more on behavior-descriptive verbs in person description and memory. In Studies 1 (N = 80) and 2 (N = 128), Italians used more adjectives and fewer verbs than Japanese to describe individuals and groups. Likewise, Studies 3 (N = 161) and 4 (N = 84) revealed that Italians committed more memory errors indicative of behavior-to-trait inferences, whereas Japanese showed an opposite tendency (Study 3) or no difference (Study 4). Study 5 (N = 64) revealed that in both languages, adjectives were perceived to provide more information about the actor and that verbs were perceived to provide more information about the situation. Yet, Japanese participants found adjectives less predictive of future behavior but facilitative of the process of imagining a concrete situation. These results are interpreted as providing evidence for systematic cultural differences in the elaboration of social information.

Converting Verbs into Adjectives: Asymmetrical Memory Distortions for Stereotypic and Counterstereotypic Information

This paper investigated the hypotheses that (a) inferences from behaviors to traits would occur more frequently than vice versa, (b) this induction-deduction asymmetry would be facilitated by stereotype congruence but inhibited by incongruence, and (c) the tendency to draw trait inferences from stereotype-congruent but not from stereotype-incongruent behaviors would become more pronounced with increasing levels of Need for Cognitive Closure. Participants read information about a female or male job applicant that was in part relevant to gender, in part gender-neutral. The gender-relevant information was either stereotype-congruent or incongruent. Half of the information was presented as trait-adjectives, half as behavior-descriptive verbs. A recognition task was constructed so that some of the items (traits and behaviors) had actually been seen, some were entirely new, and some were new but had been implied by the information given. All three hypotheses were supported. Implications for intra-individual and interpersonal stereotype maintenance are discussed.

Inferring traits from behaviors versus behaviors from traits: the induction-deduction asymmetry

It is argued that inductive inferences from behaviors to traits are performed more frequently than deductive inferences from traits to behaviors-a phenomenon referred to as the induction-deduction asymmetry. Two experiments are reported in which behavior-to-trait inferences and trait-to-behavior inferences were compared within the same paradigm: Participants learned a series of descriptions of a target person, half of which were presented in trait form, half in behavior form. A subsequent recognition task was constructed so that some of the items (traits and behaviors) had actually been seen, some were entirely new, and some were new but had been implied by the information given. The 2 experiments provide clear evidence for the hypothesis that traits implied by a behavior are more frequently misidentified as already seen than behaviors implied by a trait. Response-time data in Experiment 2 further suggest that inferences from behaviors to traits are made on-line, whereas inferences from traits to behaviors appear to be memory based.