Spontaneous Trait Inferences: Are They Linked to the Actor or to the Action?

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Abstract
This article analyzes whether spontaneous trait inferences explicitly refer to a disposition of the actor or whether they only identify the type of behavior in which the actor was engaged. The authors used a novel primed recognition paradigm, in which participants had to indicate whether the implied trait was part of the original sentence after being briefly primed with the name of the actor, verb (i.e., action), or a control word. If traits are spontaneously encoded during reading, participants will tend to erroneously recognize the trait as part of the sentence or will need extra time to inhibit this error. The results from three experiments demonstrate that spontaneous trait inferences are associated with both the actor and action and that information disconfirming a causal attribution to the person eliminates these spontaneous trait inferences.
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