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New bottles for new and old wine : new proposals for the study of spontaneous trait inferences
Publication . Orghian, Diana; Marques, Leonel Garcia, 1958-; Wigboldus, Daniel
An important research topic in social cognition concerns the way people understand others’behaviors and the way they use this information to categorize others and infer causes for their actions. More specifically, in this dissertation, we investigated the Spontaneous Trait Inference (STI), a phenomenon that allow people to infer or extract personality traits from others’ overt behaviors and to use those traits to make further judgments. It is a spontaneous mechanism because it occurs without intention or awareness. The dissertation is organized in two parts that deal will two distinct aspects of STI. The first aspect regards the processes responsible for the occurrence of STI. The second is about the paradigms used to detect STI and their limitations. In the first part, we discuss the two perspectives that exist in the literature regarding the processes underlying STI. These two perspectives emerged as a reaction to the discovery of a surprising phenomenon, the Spontaneous Trait Transferences (STT). STTs occur when a trait is inferred from a behavior and associated with someone else that not the actor: a communicator, a bystander or any other irrelevant stimulus present in the context at the encoding moment. Based on empirical differences between STI and STT, a dualistic perspective was proposed in which STI are said to result from attributional thinking and STT from simple associations. A different perspective suggests that the same process, an associative one, can be responsible for both. Our contribution to this debate was to develop a computational model in order to demonstrate that the evidence supporting a dualist view are weak, because a simple associative model can reproduce, not only STI and STT, but also the empirical differences between them. Moreover, as an assumption of the model, we argued that there might be an attentional difference between STI and STT. Thus, next we tested this assumption by using the spatial cueing paradigm and eye-tracking devices, which allowed us to conclude that people pay more attention to the actor of a behavior than to an irrelevant person presented with it. Also in agreement with the attentional difference and with the model, we showed, by using forced recognition paradigm, that in both STI and STT the trait is inferred in a similar way from the behavior, whereas the memory for the photo is better in STI than in STT. In the second part of the dissertation, we discuss the main methodologies used to measure STI. We start by examining a confound present in many studies investigating STI, the word-based priming. This confound consists in the activation of the trait based, not on the interpretation of the whole sentence and the behavior in it described, but on the presence of specific words that alone lead to the priming of the trait. Moreover, we showed that this is only a problem for the immediate measures of STI such probe recognition paradigm, but not for delayed, such the false recognition. A different limitation that affects all the measures based on memory is the contamination with explicit recall of the sentence. The use of online measures can solve, in part, that problem. However, online measures are data-driven, or, in other words, are measures that rely on feature and perceptive processing. This characteristic makes them unsuitable for STI, that is a conceptuallydriven mechanism. Thus, we introduce a new implicit conceptual measure, the modified free association task. In this task people first read trait-implying or control material. Afterwards, they perform a free association task were a word (the inferred trait) is presented and the subject is instructed to say the first word that comes to their mind when reading the presented target. We tested this new paradigm in delayed and immediate modes and we also tested its sensitivity do STI and STT difference.
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Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia
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SFRH
Número da atribuição
SFRH/BD/84668/2012