Chronic and temporary distinct expectancies as comparison standards: Automatic contrast in dispositional judgments.

Abstract

In 4 studies, the authors examined whether making outcome expectancies distinct resulted in their use as comparison standards and, consequently, in contrastive dispositional inferences for a target's behaviors. The expectancies examined were based on either chronic future-event expectancies (Study 1) or temporary, manipulated expectancy standards (Studies 2-4). Analyses revealed that when contextual expectancies were distinct or separable from target information, participants' dispositional judgments were contrasted from them under cognitive load and overcorrected (assimilated to them) under no load. These effects were mediated by participants' behavior categorizations. Evidence suggestive of a proceduralized form of correction for task difficulty and an effortful awareness-based correction for the effects of expectancies also were found. Results are examined in light of recent models of the dispositional inference process.Over the past 40 years, social psychologists have learned a great deal about how ordinary perceivers give meaning to the observed actions of another person. Early treatments focused on the contents of perceivers' intuitive theories of action. Heider (1958), for example, proposed that perceivers believe successful enactment of purposive behavior by another is dependent, in large part, on the person's ability and the difficulty of environmental factors. Put more formally, he argued that if a person succeeds at some task, then perceivers' naive theories of action hold that that person's ability must be greater than the environmental difficulty. If the person fails (and if he or she was trying to perform the task), then Gifford Weary, Stephanie J. Tobin, and Darcy A. Reich, Department of Psychology, Ohio State University.Partial reports of the data for Studies 1 and 2 were presented at the 106th Annual Convention of the American Psychological Association, San Fransisco, August 1998, as part of Gifford Weary's Division 8 Presidential Address; at the meeting of the American Psychological Association, May 1999, Chicago; and at the meeting of the American Psychological Society, June 1999, Denver, Colorado. The first two studies reported herein were completed in partial fulfillment of the Stephanie J. Tobin's master's thesis under the direction of Gifford Weary. This research was supported in part by National Science Foundation Research Grant SBR-9631858 and also by National Institute of Mental Health Training Grant T32-MH19728.We thank the other members of the master's committee, Richard E. Petty and Robert M. Arkin. We also thank John A. Edwards, John Skowronski, Bill von Hippel, Leigh Ann Vaughn, and Aaron Wichman for their helpful comments on a draft of this article. Finally, we gratefully acknowledge the help of David J. Angelo throughout the conduct of the research reported in this article.Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Gifford Weary, Department of Psychology, Ohio State University, 142 Townshend Hall, 1885 Neil Avenue Mall, Columbus, Ohio 43210.his or her ability m...

The Role of Contextual Constraints and Chronic Expectancies on Behavior Categorizations and Dispositional Inferences

“…It seems entirely possible that our general instructions suggesting that both ability and task difficulty typically affect performance might not only have made participants' self-generated situational inferences salient but also might have activated proceduralized correction processes (Lucas, Krull, & Pelham, 1999;Weary, Tobin, & Reich, 1999). Heider's (1958) analysis of perceivers' intuitive theories of action suggested the operation of a compensatory schema (Kelley, 1972) for the effects of ability and environmental difficulty on performance outcomes.…”

“…However, a few researchers recently have found evidence that, with sufficient motivation and cognitive resources, perceivers can effortfully correct their categorizations for biasing influences, at least under certain circumstances (Thompson, Roman, Moskowitz, Chaiken, & Bargh, 1994). For example, Weary et al (1999) recently have demonstrated that perceivers can recategorize behavior if they are aware of a biasing influence on their initial judgments and if they perceive that influence to be illegitimate.…”

“…With growing evidence that recategorization can occur (see also Thompson et al, 1994;Weary et al, 1999), new research issues naturally arise. Does recategorization require either the awareness of an illegitimate biasing influence (Stapel, Martin, & Schwarz, 1998) or a strong motivation to be accurate?…”

“…One participant did not fully complete the FES and was dropped from subsequent analyses. Consistent with past research (Reich & Weary, 1998;Weary et al, 1999), a median split procedure was used to divide participants into two FES groups: negative (N = 94) and positive (N = 95). 5,6 The 3 participants with scores at the median were included in the positive FES group.…”

“…Past research (Weary & Reich, 1999) using the general procedures employed in Study 1 has found that participants sometimes differ in their self-reports of engagement with the video observation task. Moreover, this variable at times has been found to account for a significant amount of variance in behavior and target inferences, such that high task engagement is associated with higher behavior and target ratings.…”