This article is based on the proposition that people attribute a disposition to an actor by evaluating its consistency with other information about the actor or the situation. This strategy is assumed to be accompanied by a cognitive set or bias to view ambiguous information as consistent with the hypothesized disposition. Respondents were told that a student had chosen or had been assigned to write a proabortion or antiabortion paper, and they were or were not given an ambiguous description of the author's personality. In support of predictions, under choice conditions attitudes were always attributed in accordance with the paper's position, but under assignment conditions such attributions occurred only when respondents received the ambiguous personality description.
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