Effects of suspicion on attributional thinking and the correspondence bias.

Abstract

This research examined why suspicion of ulterior motives leads perceivers to avoid the correspondence bias in the assigned-essay paradigm, in contrast to information about situational constraint. Five experiments offer converging evidence that suspicion triggers active, sophisticated attributional thinking. These studies examined participants' spontaneous thoughts and attributional analyses in the context of high-constraint or ulterior-motives conditions. The studies (a) suggest that high-constraint information and ulterior-motive information have divergent effects on perceivers early in the inference process, (b) demonstrate the correspondence bias in instances in which demand characteristics arc minimized, and (c) show that the effects of suspicion can endure across targets and contexts. The implications of these results for current models of the correspondence bias and the dispositional inference process, and suggestions for a revised model, are discussed.Suspicion is a unique aspect of social perception. Perceivers are aware that the targets of their social perceptions occasionally behave in ways that are meant to deceive them. Although perceivers may be fooled by nonsocial objects, they are not likely to suspect that these objects intended to behave in a particular manner to convey fictitious or misleading information. Our curses to the contrary, most of us realize that our computers do not intentionally crash whenever they sense that we are under unusually great amounts of pressure. Relative to the processes involved in object perception, perceivers who wish to understand and predict the behaviors of social beings must engage in much more sophisticated attributional analyses. An outcome of this need is the. psychological state of suspicion.The studies reported in this article examined how suspicion affects the dispositional inferences that perceivers draw from another individual's behavior. One of the most fundamental points of social psychology is that such inferences tend to fail to take into sufficient account the situation in which the behavior occurred. The voluminous and oft-cited literature concerning the fundamental attribution error, or correspondence bias, speaks to this point. In sharp contrast to this robust bias, however, there is some evidence to suggest that when perceivers learn information that provides them with reason to suspect the motives of the actor, they tend to draw inferences that do not reflect this bias. Jones, Davis, and Gergen (1961), for example, found that participants who had reason to suspect that a job candidate may have been influenced by ulterior motives when responding to questions about his personality tended to discount the candidate's statements and refused to draw correspondent inferences (see also Reeder & Brewer, 1979; Reeder, Messick, & Van Aver-I would like to thank

Social cognition and the brain: A meta‐analysis

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