Reframing the Rocky Road: From Causal Analysis to Mindreading as the Drama of Disposition Inference

A quarter century ago, the matter of disposition inference seemed to have a relatively clear framing question: How do perceivers resolve the causality underlying an actor’s behavior? Or, more specifically, how do perceivers discriminate between internal causes of behavior located within an actor (which would thus signal his or her invariant dispositions) and external causes located within a context (suggesting that the behavior may not correspond to a disposition)? Beginning with Heider (1958), carrying on through E. E. Jones (1979), Kelley (1973), and many others in the attribution tradition, this perspective offered traction on the basic topic of how people figure one another out. Through several generations of studying the everyday perceiver as a causal analyst, psychologists have learned a great deal about how, and sometimes how poorly, disposition inferences seem to unfold (Gilbert, 1998). In the past decade or so, a somewhat different frame has emerged, portraying perceivers not as causal analysts so much as mindreaders. Drawing in part on cognitive science and philosophy surrounding theory of mind (see, e.g., Malle & Hodges, 2005), this perspective does not necessarily say that attribution theory is wrong but rather offers an alternative stance for conceptualizing the drama of social perception. Instead of the attributional story about the perceiver struggling to answer “Why did that happen? ” the growing mindreading story casts the perceiver beholding an actor and wondering “What is she thinking? ” To use E. E. Jones’s (1979) phase, this new story has the perceivers’ rocky road to disposition inference running through judgments about what’s going on in an actor’s mind. Reeder’s work over recent years, thoughtfully summarized and integrated with related research in the target article in this issue, has substantially pulled the discipline in the direction of this new framing. He persuasively describes how the basic “internal versus external” attribution dichotomy leaves considerable ambiguity in the case of intentional behavior. Reeder also lays out a compelling case for how situations provide important—and oftentimes essential—information about actors’ motives. Reeder and colleagues’ research combines with other noteworthy contributions that promote a mindreading frame, including Fein and colleagues’ work on suspicion (e.g., Fein, Hilton, & Miller, 1990), Kammrath and colleague’s work on behavior profiles (Kammrath, Mendoza-Denton, & Mischel, 2005), Malle and colleagues’ work on intentionality (e.g., Malle, 2004), Read and colleagues’ work on traits as goal-based categories (e.g., Read & Miller, 2005), and some of my own work with my colleagues on impression formation (e.g., Ames, 2005; Ames, Flynn, & Weber, 2004). The impact of Reeder’s target article will be, I hope, another step in the direction of this mindreading frame, which promises new insights while also carrying its own limitations—and I offer some comments on both in the paragraphs that follow. My misgivings with Reeder’s account are relatively minor. For one, I am not sure that the “multiple inference model” label quite captures the essential part of Reeder’s argument. Although it suggests the plurality of judgments that perceivers often make, it does not seem to reflect Reeder’s central point that, for intentional behaviors, perceivers typically make motive inferences and these guide trait inferences. In this sense, “multiple” is underspecific. I also suspect that at least some attribution theorists would resist the “single inference model” label applied to their work, as they, too, suggest a sequence of judgments, starting with the assignment of causality and then leading on to the ascription of traits. It could be that labels such as the “mentalistic model” or the “mindreading model” would more precisely capture the account’s essence and its important distinction from traditional attributional models. Another stumbling point for me was the identification of five categories that accounted for “the majority of studies” on dispositional inference (attitude attribution, moral attribution, ability attribution, the