On the Spontaneity of Trait Attribution: Converging Evidence for the Role of Cognitive Strategy

Winter and Uleman (1984) recently argued that trait attributions occur spontaneously during the comprehension of behavior descriptions about others. Their research was based on the notion of encoding specificity and relied on the effectiveness of dispositional cues in retrieving stimulus information from memory. We tested this claim in Experiment 1 by replicating their procedures and adding a condition in which subjects were explicitly instructed to adopt an impression set. If subjects always engage in trait attribution spontaneously as they comprehend sentences, then instructing them to do so should leave performance unchanged. Although sentence recall was not affected by learning instructions when semantic associates of the actor were presented as retrieval cues, memory was significantly better after impression formation instructions if personality traits were used as retrieval cues. This difference in performance suggests that trait attribution occurs only with limited frequency under conditions of mere sentence comprehension. A second experiment provided further evidence for the paucity of attributional inferences in response to behavior descriptions. A novel procedure, that of word-fragment completion, was introduced to test for the activation of trait concepts in memory. Substantially more activation followed impression instructions than followed memory instructions, which indicates in a converging fashion that trait attributions do not always occur spontaneously during sentence comprehension.