Spontaneous State Inferences

Abstract

People are social animals. In order to successfully navigate through our social environment, we routinely form impressions of others. One way to do so is observing and interpreting others’ behavior. Research on spontaneous trait inferences (STIs) has revealed that people use behavioral information to spontaneously infer dispositional information (i.e., traits) about actors. Dispositional inferences have since then been central and ubiquitous in social psychological theorizing about person perception – at times even coined fundamental attribution error (Gawronski, 2004). While previous research has provided substantial evidence that trait inferences can and do occur, it has neither demonstrated that traits are the only or even the dominant category of inference, and neglected considerations of the occurrence of other spontaneous person inferences. My dissertation research aims at bridging this theoretical and empirical gap, and demonstrating that people can and do infer mental states from behavior at least as much as they infer personality traits. This dissertation consists of three related series of experiments. In Chapter 3, I present a series of four pre-registered experiments focused on providing proof of concept with regard to spontaneous state inferences. We employed two classical experimental paradigms repeatedly used in STI research, a false recognition task in Experiments 1-3 and a probe recognition paradigm in Experiment 4, and behavioral statements that potentially allowed for either a trait- or a state-inference (Experiments 1 and 2) or both inferences simultaneously (Experiments 3 and 4). Results document significant effects of both, trait and state inferences with moderate effect sizes (dz = 0.22 - 1.60). We thus replicated the established trait- inference effect and, more importantly, provided first empirical evidence for the occurrence of spontaneous state inferences. In Experiment 5, we further demonstrated that participants ascribe differential predictive value to traits and states, indicating a functional distinction between state and trait inferences. In the further two chapters, we aimed at providing a better understanding of process characteristics of state inferences.