The Use of Trait Conceptions to Identify Other People's Behavior and to Draw Inferences about their Personalities

Abstract

According to Trope's model, dispositional judgment results from two stages, behavior identification and dispositional inference. This article first reviews research on factors affecting behavior identification-behavior ambiguity, the order of situational and behavioral information, and awareness of alternative meanings of behavior-and then develops the dispositional inference stage theoretically. At this stage, perceivers evaluate the hypothesis that a target's disposition corresponds to his or her identified behavior by assessing an identified behavior's diagnosticity and integrating it with prior information. Diagnosticity derives from causal models of how situations affect individuals of differing dispositions; dispositional hypotheses may be evaluated systematically or heuristically. 7he analysis is then applied to intrinsic and extrinsic inducements, to state and trait inference, and to causal and noncausal (descriptive) inference.