Spontaneous trait transference to familiar communicators: is a little knowledge a dangerous thing?

In most social cognition research participants are presented with unattributed information about unfamiliar stimulus persons. However, in the real world it is more common for people to learn about others through social communication and to know something about those with whom they communicate. Such issues are explored in relation to spontaneous trait transference, a phenomenon in which communicators are perceived as having traits that they merely describe in others. Three studies show that even familiar communicators became associated with, and attributed, the traits implied by their remarks. Surprisingly, these effects occurred even when the implied traits were incongruent with participants' prior knowledge about these communicators. The results are discussed in terms of (a) the generalizability of social cognition research, (b) the automaticity of simple associative phenomena, and (c) the interplay of simple associative and higher level processes.

Spontaneous trait transference: communicators taken on the qualities they describe in others.

Spontaneous trait transference occurs when communicators are perceived as possessing the very traits they describe in others. Study 1 confirmed that communicators become associated with the trait implications of their descriptions of others and that such associations persist over time. Study 2 demonstrated that these associations influence specific trait impressions of communicators. Study 3 suggested that spontaneous trait transference reflects simple associative processes that occur even when there are no logical bases for making inferences. Finally, Study 4 used more naturalistic stimuli and provided additional evidence that the phenomenon reflects mindless associations rather than logical attributions. Together these studies demonstrate that spontaneous trait transference is a reliable phenomenon that plays a previously unrecognized role in social perception and interaction.

Savings in relearning: II. On the formation of behavior-based trait associations and inferences.

Five experiments based on Carlston and Skowronski's (1994) relearning paradigm suggest that people spontaneously derive trait knowledge about actors from behaviors but that this knowledge may reflect either explicit trait inference processes or implicit actor-trait associations. Experiments 1 and 2 found that inference-instructed and control Ss showed equivalent savings in subsequent efforts to learn actor-trait pairs but not when instructed Ss initially inferred the wrong trait. Experiment 3 showed that savings were equivalent for stimuli from different sources, and Experiment 4 showed that savings effects persisted even when the target was only incidentally associated with a stimulus behavior. Finally, Experiment 5 suggests that after several days, even explicit trait inferences can become inaccessible to intentional retrieval, although the earlier experiments show that they continue to exert an implicit effect on learning.

Trait memory and behavior memory: the effects of alternative pathways on impression judgment response times.

Carlston (1980a) and Lingle (1983) argued that remembered behaviors, previous trait inferences, or both may be accessed and used in making new trait inferences, depending on a variety of factors. In this article we relate this argument to a spreading activation model of memory and suggest factors that should affect the relative accessibility of inferences and behaviors during trait judgment processes. In our study we varied several of these factors and assessed accessibility, using response-time methods. The results of this study strongly support the model's prediction that prompting inference formation facilitates subsequent trait judgment response times, but only when relevant behavior memories have not been recently primed. We theorize that the inference manipulations used in this study strengthened the direct pathway to a relevant trait concept, but that the strength of this pathway was immaterial to judgment response times when a "proximal prime" directed retrieval efforts along an alternative "behavioral" route to the trait information. The results also suggest that the proximal behavior prime facilitated trait responses among subjects who had not been induced to make trait inferences, but slowed trait responses among subjects who had previously been induced to make trait inferences.

Consequences of schemata for attention, impressions, and recall in complex social interactions.

A study was conducted to assess the effects of personality schemata on attentional allocation, impressions, and memory among observers of a complex social interaction. Subjects were first primed with schematic descriptions of an actor, and then they listened to an audiotape in which that actor and another participated in several separate conversations, with the primed actor either in the foreground or in the background. Other subjects could throw a switch to shift either actors' conversations into the foreground. As predicted, subjects in this last group shifted their attention away from the primed actor after determining that his behavior did not violate the schema they had been given and shifted their attention back when the primed actor acted in a schema-inconsistent manner. Analyses of all three attentional conditions revealed that the less attention subjects were able to pay to the primed actor, the more they relied on their schemata in making impression judgments, the more confident they were in the occurrence of schema-consistent "false alarm" behaviors, and the less confident they were in the occurrence of schema-inconsistent and schema-irrelevant behaviors. These results are discussed in terms of subject strategies in dealing with information overload when processing complex stimuli.