INTENTIONAL AND AUTOMATIC PROCESSES IN TRAIT INFERENCES

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The impressions we form of others are basic determinants of most social interactions and decisions about other people. These impressions are usually based on observing behavior and encoding the observation in some summary form, such as traits. Basic as trait inferences and encoding are, little is known about the processing stages in making trait inferences, and the extent to which such inferences are under intentional control. The 14 proposed studies are part of a program of research on the effects of intentions and automatic processing on the trait inference process. Using trait-implying descriptions of behavior as stimuli and a cued recall paradigm, we have shown that people can mke trait inferences at encoding during comprehension, without either intentions to do so or awareness of having done so. These inferences are termed "spontaneous" because they are neither fully automatic nor controlled. The proposed studies examine several hypothesized stages in trait inferences: using context to disambiguate polysemous words (and acts, by implication) in behavior descriptions; characterizing the behavior more abstractly; linking the behavior characterization to the actor concept; and encoding the result into long term memory. They focus on the time course of these processing stages, and the effects of the observers' processing goals on each stage. The central question is how much people are, or can be aware of their own trait inference processes, and how much they can control them. Recognition reaction times, cross-modal interference in lexical decisions, and primed recognition reaction time procedures are used in addition to more traditional recall measures. Processing goals are varied directly through instructions, and indirectly through the stimuli's vividness, veracity, and relatedness to the actor. This research should (a) provide evidence for the hypothesized stages in inferring traits from behavior descriptions, (b) clarify the limits of control people can have over these processing stages and their results, and (c) broaden the range of methods available for studying person perception processes that are basic to a wide range of social phenomena, from psychiatric diagnoses to stereotyping.