Cultural differences in the correction of social inferences: Does the dispositional rebound occur in an interdependent culture?

Although social observers have been found to rely heavily on dispositions in their causal analysis, it has been proposed that culture strongly affects this tendency. Recent research has shown that suppressing dispositional inferences during social judgment can lead to a dispositional rebound, that is relying more on dispositional information in subsequent judgments. In the present research, we investigated whether culture also affects this rebound tendency. First, Thai and Belgian participants took part in a typical attitude attribution paradigm. Next, dispositional rebound was assessed by having participants describe a series of pictures. The dispositional rebound occurred for both Belgian and Thai participants when confronted with a forced target, but disappeared for Thai participants when the situational constraints of the target were made salient. The findings are discussed in light of the current cultural models of attribution theory

The return of dispositionalism: On the linguistic consequences of dispositional suppression

Yzerbyt, Corneille, Dumont, and Hahn (2001) showed that the correction of dispositional inferences does not only involve a close examination of situational constraints but also the suppression of those dispositional inferences. Building on the literature of mental control (Wegner, 1994; Wenzlaff & Wegner, 2000) and the Linguistic Category Model (Semin & Fiedler, 1988), we reasoned that participants induced to correct their dispositional attribution by being exposed to a forced speaker would subsequently use more abstract (i.e., dispositional) language to describe social behaviors than participants first confronted with a free speaker. We thus argue that dispositional suppression may result in a procedural rebound. As expected, participants selected more disposition-laden descriptors for pictorially presented behaviors after the suppression of dispositional thoughts (Experiment 1) or after having seen a forced rather than a free speaker (Experiment 2). These findings are discussed in the context of current theoretical accounts of the correspondence bias and suppressional rebound

You want to give a good impression? Be honest! Moral traits dominate group impression formation.

Research has shown that warmth and competence are core dimensions on which perceivers judge others and that warmth has a primary role at various phases of impression formation. Three studies explored whether the two components of warmth (i.e., sociability and morality) have distinct roles in predicting the global impression of social groups. In Study 1 (N= 105) and Study 2 (N= 112), participants read an immigration scenario depicting an unfamiliar social group in terms of high (vs. low) morality, sociability, and competence. In both studies, participants were asked to report their global impression of the group. Results showed that global evaluations were better predicted by morality than by sociability or competence-trait ascriptions. Study 3 (N= 86) further showed that the effect of moral traits on group global evaluations was mediated by the perception of threat. The importance of these findings for the impression-formation process is discussed