Judging Situations: On the Effortful Process of Taking Dispositional Information Into Account

Abstract

How do people draw inferences from others' behavior? Research suggests that it is an effortful process for perceivers to take situational information into account when drawing a dispositional inference. It is proposed that this previous work may reflect perceivers' general difficulty in thinking about alternatives rather than a distinction between how people think dispositionally and how they think situationally. An experiment investigated whether it requires effort for perceivers to take dispositional information into account when drawing a situational inference. Participants viewed a silent videotape of an anxious interviewee with the goal of diagnosing the degree of anxiety provoked by the interview topic. Participants were given either calm or anxious information about the interviewee's personality. Within these conditions, half of the participants were cognitively busy and half were not. Nonbusy participants were able to use information about the target's disposition when drawing situational inferences, whereas busy participants were not. A second experiment replicated this finding and demonstrated that the effects were not due to differences in how the behavior was interpreted. These experiments suggest that it is an effortful process for perceivers to take dispositional information into account when drawing a situational inference, and that, in general, effort may be required for perceivers to think about alternatives.

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