Explanatory Coherence in Social Explanation

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In this program of research, a series of experiments tests a parallel processing model of social perception and social explanation. This model differs sharply from the two-stage, serial processing , models that currently dominate much social psychology. One set of studies seeks to demonstrate that when subjects are combining dispositional and situational information, whether they underadjust for either dispositional or situational factors under high cognitive load, and the extent to which they do so, reflects the impact of attentional focus and causal unit formation on the spread of activation in a conceptual network. Such results would contradict Gilbert's (1989) model of dispositonal inference and would, at a minimum, force a major expansion of Krull's (1993) model. A second set of studies attempts to show that just as individuals frequently make spontaneous situational inferences, so do they frequently make spontaneous situaitonal inferences. These studies also seek to show that the latter influences do not require a goal to make such inferences as Krull (1993) suggests, but rather are under the control of the stimulus configuration. Several factors are investigated that may influence the likelihood of spontaneous situational inferences: (1) individualist vs. collectivist beliefs; (2) proximity of the situational causal context to the target behavior; and (3) salience of the situational causal context. A third set of studies examines whether situational and dispositional information can be quickly and spontaneously integrated, in parallel, to make a spontaneous dispositional inference, thereby arguing against models that propose a two step process for the integration of dispositional and situational information. A fourth set of studies will test the hypothesis that factors, such as cognitive load and salience which should reduce the spread of activation from explanations to behavior identifications, will reduce the impact of explanatory hypotheses on the id entification of ambiguous behaviors. This program of research has the potential to replace several special-purpose 'mini' theories of social explanation with a general connectionist model that can handle a wide variety of phenomena. Figuring out the characteristics of others is central to successfully negotiating everyday life. But doing so is surprisingly complicated. This program of research tests a model which seeks to explain how people do this. A central claim of this model is that when people make inferences about the causes of behavior, such as "Sheila was furious", the available information is integrated simultaneously into a limited capacity working memory rather than being processed serially. The implication of this parallel processing of information is that the causal explanation that a person favors (e.g., "Sheila is short tempered" or "Sheila was insulted") will depend upon things that influence information integration, such as the person's focus of attention, the strength of pre-existing causal links among potential causes and effects, and how much demand is being placed on the person's cognitive capacities by other ongoing tasks. The results will have important implications for our understanding of biases in social perception.