Perceiver Pessimism and the Dispositional Inference Process

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This project examines the impact of perceivers' chronic and temporary, positive and negative future-event expectancies on social judgments and evaluations. This program of research relies on multi-stage models of the social inference process to tease apart the direction of and stage at which such effects occur. Of particular interest is the potential reversal of perceivers' typical expectancy-consistent biases on their perceptions of and ability inferences for another's performance outcomes. This work should yield information about the necessary and sufficient conditions for such reversals of perceivers' expectancy-related biases, as well as the mechanisms underlying them. The results might well suggest that parts of the inference process are more flexible and more complex than previously thought. This work also should have important implications for work on the social and human potential costs associated with perceiver pessimism. To the degree that evaluators in a variety of settings (e.g., school, work) have multiple task demands and role-related stressors that occupy their available cognitive resources, their activated expectancies may well bias their judgments of others. The costs of such biased evaluations are potentially enormous, both for the target individual and for society. The results of this research, then, should aid in the development of effective de-biasing interventions for several of the more deleterious and pervasive effects of perceiver pessimism.