Grasping for Traits or Reasons? How People Grapple With Puzzling Social Behaviors

Abstract

Within social psychology, it is well accepted that trait inference is the dominant tool for understanding others' behavior. Outside of social psychology, a different consensus has emerged, namely, that people predominantly explain behavior in terms of mental states. Both positions are based on limited evidence. The trait literature focuses on trait ascriptions to persons, not explanations of behavior. The mental state literature focuses on explanations of ordinary behaviors (for which social scripts provide mental states), not of expectancy-violating behaviors. We examined the critical test case for the two opposing positions: explanations of expectancy-violating behaviors. Participants provided open-ended explanations of puzzling actions, which were content-analyzed for use of mental states, traits, and other causal background factors. Across four studies, three stimulus sets, and two subpopulations, people overwhelmingly offered mental states when explaining puzzling actions (compared with ordinary actions), while they struggled to generate traits and other background factors.

Dissecting Dispositionality: Distance Increases Stability of Attribution

“…The present results are also relevant for research on mental state inferences, a more recent trend in attribution research. Research on mental state inferences examines attributions to specific internal causes, for example, to goals in contrast to traits (Korman & Malle, 2016; Malle, 2011; Olcaysoy Okten & Moskowitz, 2018; Reeder, 2009; van Overwalle, van Duynslaeger, Coomans, & Timmermans, 2012; for a review see Moskowitz & Olcaysoy Okten, 2016) From a causal dimension perspective, goals and other mental states are internal and unstable, while traits are internal and stable. Thus, the question whether a behavior is attributed to goals or traits can be seen as the question whether an internal attribution is unstable or stable.…”

Teleology and mentalizing in the explanation of action

“…For instance, from over 700 participants and over 6000 explanations, on average, across five studies, people offered 80% reason explanations of their own behavior, and 60% reason explanations of other people's behavior (Malle 2005, p. 165). While these studies involved ordinary behaviors, in experiments involving puzzling behaviors, the same dominance of reason explanations was discovered (Korman and Malle 2016).…”

Desentendimiento Moral Y Atribución De Culpa: Encuentros Y Desencuentros en El Estudio De La Cognición Moral

“…En general, hay una predominancia de explicación de la conducta desde la presencia de estados mentales como creencias e intenciones (Korman & Malle, 2016;Voiklis, Cusimano, & Malle, 2014), tanto en la conducta individual como de grupos (O'Laughlin & Malle, 2002). Por ello, estos modelos se han preocupado por el desarrollo de los conceptos mentalistas, la evolución de la cognición social durante la infancia y su influencia en el desarrollo moral (Heiphetz & Young, 2014).…”