A Correction Model of Dispositional Inference

A CORRECTION MODEL OF DISPOSITIONAL INFERENCE

We care about what others do, but we care more about why they do it. Two equally rambunctious nephews may break two equally expensive crystal vases at Aunt Sofia’s house, but the one who did so by accident gets the reprimand and the one who did so by design gets the thumbscrews. Aunts are in the business of understanding what makes nephews act as they do, and for some time, social psychologists have been in the business of explaining how aunts achieve those understandings (e.g., Bem, 1967; Heider, 1958; Hilton & Slugoski, 1986; Jones & Davis, 1965; Kelley, 1967; Medcof, 1990; Reeder & Brewer, 1979; Trope, 1986; Weiner, Frieze, Kukla, Reed, Rest, & Rosenbaum, 1972). These so-called attribution theories differ in both focus and detail, but most are grounded in a metaphor that construes the human skin as a special boundary that separates one set of causal forces from another. On the sunny side of the epidermis are the external or situational forces that press inward on the person, and on the meaty side are the internal or personal forces that exert pressure outward. Sometimes these forces press in conjunction, sometimes in opposition, and their dynamic interplay manifests itself as observable behavior. As such, aunts can determine the causes of behavior in much the same way that they determine the causes of physical movement: By observing the motion of an object (“The balloon rose rapidly in the morning sky”) and then subtracting out the contribution of the external forces (“A light wind nudged the balloon ever upward”), an observer can estimate the magnitude and direction of the internal forces (“The balloon must have contained helium that contributed to the speed of its ascent”). According to attribution theories, aunts think of nephews as they think of balloons – objects whose behavioral motions are partially determined by the prevailing winds and partially determined by the rare and noble gasses with which genes and experience have inflated them.

Attribution theories suggest that because the psychological world is a mirror of the physical world, the two may be penetrated by the same logic. People behave as they do because of the kinds of people they are and because of the kinds of situations in which their behaviors unfold; thus, when we “make an attribution” about another, we attempt to determine which of these factors – the person or the person’s situation – played the more significant role in shaping the person’s behavior. Is the basketball player a graceless shooter, or did poor lighting cause him to miss the free throw? Did the senator speak in favor of abortion rights because she truly believes in freedom of choice, or was she merely pandering to the desires of her liberal audience? Did the student appear sad because he is chronically depressed, or had he just received word of a failing grade? Each of these is a question about the relative contributions to behavior of situational and dispositional factors, and this distinction is the defining feature of attribution theory.

Attribution theory’s fundamental distinction leads quite naturally to its fundamental rule: When a behavior occurs in the presence of a sufficiently strong, facilitative force, an observer should not infer that the actor is predisposed to perform that behavior. Just as one should not confidently conclude that a balloon that rises on a windy day is filled with helium, one cannot make confident inferences about the abilities of an athlete, the convictions of a politician, or the mental health of a student when poor lighting, a roomful of opinionated voters, or sudden bad news may have induced their behaviors. In other words, we should not explain with dispositions that which has already been explained by the situation. This logical rule was first formalized by Jones and Davis (1965) as the law of noncommon effects and later extended and codified by Kelley (1967) as the discounting principle, which warns us not to attribute an effect to any one causal agent (e.g., a disposition) when another plausible causal agent (e.g., a situational force) is simultaneously present. When people do precisely what the physical environment or the social situation demands, dispositional inferences are logically unwarranted.

This simple rule is eminently reasonable but, as with the interstate speed limit, someone seems to have neglected to tell the drivers. Although ordinary people may acknowledge the logical validity of the discounting principle when it is stated in the abstract, in practice they are sometimes willing to abandon it. People may make inferences about the dispositions of others even when situational forces explain the behavior quite nicely. In scores of experiments, participants have violated attribution theory’s logical canon by concluding that an actor was predisposed to certain behaviors, when in fact, those behaviors were demanded by the situations in which they occurred. Basketball players who are randomly assigned to shoot free throws in badly lighted gyms may, on average, be judged as less capable than players who are randomly assigned to shoot free throws on a well-lighted court (e.g., Ross, Amabile, & Steinmetz, 1977); politicians who are randomly assigned to read pro-choice speeches may, on average, be judged as more pro-choice than politicians who are randomly assigned to read pro-life speeches (e.g., Jones & Harris, 1967); students who are randomly assigned to receive bad news may, on average, be judged as more chronically depressed than students who are randomly assigned to receive good news (e.g., Gilbert, Pelham, & Krull, 1988). And so on. This logical error has been called “as robust and reliable a phenomenon as any in the literature on person perception” (Quattrone, 1982a, p. 376). So what causes it?

Building on the work of Tversky and Kahneman (1974), Quattrone (1982), and Trope (1986), my collaborators and I developed a model of the process by which enduring, unobservable, internal states are inferred from observable actions. We argued that dispositional inference comprises three sequential stages, which we dubbed categorization, characterization, and correction. According to this model, perceivers categorize or identify the actor’s behavior (“Gee, my classmate sure is acting nervous”), characterize the actor in terms of enduring behavioral predispositions (“He must be an anxious sort of fellow”), and finally, correct these inferences with information about external influences on the actor’s behavior (“Of course, the professor is really putting him on the spot, so maybe he’s not such an anxious guy after all”).

The evidence we offered for our model was grounded in a popular conceptualization of conscious attention as a scant resource. According to this view, people’s attempts to, say, solve a crossword puzzle and recite the alphabet backwards do not cooccur successfully because each task requires the same limited resource – namely, conscious attention, size small (see Kahneman, 1973; Norman & Bobrow, 1975). However, two simple or well-practiced tasks, such as driving one’s car from home to office while whistling a tune, may be performed simultaneously precisely because neither requires much of this attentional resource (Hasher & Zacks, 1979; Posner & Snyder, 1975; Schneider & Shiffrin, 1977; Wegner & Bargh, 1998). We suggested that categorization and characterization were less effortful than correction, and thus predicted that people whose attentional resources had been commandeered temporarily by an extraneous task (such as an experimenter’s request that they recite the alphabet backwards) should be perfectly capable of performing the first two of these operations but should have considerable trouble performing the last. As such, these “cognitively busy” observers should draw dispositional inferences about actors whose behaviors are clearly the products of situational constraints.