Have Dispositional Inferences Been Oversold? The Role of Trait Judgments in the Multiple Inference Model

In the years 1986–1987, shortly after I began my own research career—focused, initially, on the processes involved in inferring personality traits and storing those inferences in long-term memory—the number of papers with titles or abstracts containing the phrases “trait inference,” “dispositional inference,” or “person memory” appearing in 10 of the publications most likely to publish such work (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Social Cognition, European Journal of Social Psychology, British Journal of Social Psychology, Journal of Social Psychology, Basic and Applied Social Psychology, Journal of Social Behavior and Personality, and Advances in Experimental Social Psychology) was 14. Ten years later (1996–1997), the corresponding number was 23. What about the most recent full 2-year period (2006–2007) prior to the writing of this commentary? Only 7 can be found. Clearly, a more extensive (and less superficial) literature search would be needed to confirm the pattern suggested by those numbers, but the drop-off is striking. What accounts for it? Obviously, topics rise and fall in popularity in different fields of study, social psychology not excluded. Research paradigms exhaust themselves and run their course (Kuhn, 1962). But in his discussion of the multiple inference model (MIM), Reeder—one of the most thoughtful, productive, and influential students of the processes involved in dispositional inference—hints at another possible factor. Reeder (consistent with Malle, 2004) argues that people “seem more interested in the specific beliefs and motives of others than in their abstract traits” (p. 12). Indeed, “spontaneous references to a target person’s abstract traits or dispositions are comparatively rare” (p. 15), findings that “question the prevalence of lay dispositionism” (p. 11). Those conclusions, it should be noted, were meant to apply primarily to a particular class of behaviors: intentional acts, and not those in the category of “unintentional behavior in response to hard constraints” (p. 7; i.e., not behaviors such as skilled performances attempted in the face of major obstacles, or emotional reactions in response to affectively charged stimuli). But that, arguably, means that those conclusions apply to most human behavior of interest to social and personality psychologists. Questions about the centrality of stable dispositional concepts in the everyday construal of social behavior have been raised before. In a rarely cited study by De Raad (1984), 244 participants provided open-ended accounts of “person-talk situations” in which they had been involved. In other words, they were simply asked to reveal the way in which they talk with their friends and acquaintances about what people are like. De Raad noted that a “striking result is that personality descriptive adjectives were used in only 4 or 5% of the 244 cases. Most utterances . consisted of behavior or state descriptions. This result was unexpected” (p. 35). A decade later, Roy Baumeister and I (Baumeister & Newman, 1994) discussed the possibility that people are as likely (if not more so) to represent their knowledge about themselves and others in terms of narratives or stories as they are to do so in terms of abstract traits (see also Schank & Ableson, 1995). A great deal of research has been conducted based on the assumption that when Michael shares his potato chips with Miriam, what perceivers want to know is whether Michael is “generous” so that they can then store this information in memory and use it to guide future interactions with him. Increasingly, though, person perception researchers are taking seriously the idea that perceivers will instead be focused on what effect Michael was trying to have on Miriam (“he wants her to like him”), what he was trying to accomplish (“he wants her to share her notes with him”), why he was trying to do so (“the test is tomorrow and he hasn’t studied”), and why he thought his efforts would be successful (“Miriam is lonely and would probably appreciate the attention”). In other words, inferring invariant dispositions might take a backseat to a quest for an understanding of the immediate meaning of people’s behavior in the situation in which it takes place (see also Swann, 1984).