Effects of Suspicion on Attributional Thinking and the Correspondence Bias

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 t...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of personality and social psychology 1996-06, Vol.70 (6), p.1164-1184
Main Author: Fein, Steven
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Attribution
Attributional thinking
Biological and medical sciences
Cognition
Cognition & reasoning
Contextual Associations
Correspondence bias
Factors
Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology
Human
Inference
Motivation
Perceptions
Personality
Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry
Psychology. Psychophysiology
Social attribution, perception and cognition
Social psychology
Suspicion
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary: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 are 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.
ISSN:0022-3514
1939-1315
DOI:10.1037/0022-3514.70.6.1164