ACTORS AND OBSERVERS REVISITED - CORRESPONDENCE BIAS, COUNTERFACTUAL SURPRISE, AND DISCOUNTING IN SUCCESSIVE JUDGMENTS OF CONSTRAINED BEHAVIOR

In two experiments we examined first, whether observers given information about a film actor's personality would infer correspondent dispositions from a role he played in a film, and second, the impact these judgments have on subsequent dispositional judgments made from constrained behavior of different targets. In both experiments, observers received a fictitious description of the primary actor as either interpersonally warm and sensitive or interpersonally cold and callous. Observers then watched one of two clips-depicting the primary actor playing a role that was either congruent or incongruent with the description they had received-taken from his films. Finally, observers rated the primary actor's true personality. Results showed that observers who watched a congruent film clip provided significantly more extreme correspondent dispositional ratings than did subjects who saw an incongruent clip. Following the ratings of the primary actor, all observers watched other targets engaged in constrained behavior. Observers who had received congruent information about the primary actor, especially when that information was uniformly positive, provided significantly more extreme correspondent dispositional ratings of these subsequent targets than did observers who had previously received incongruent information. Further, these observers indicated that they would be more surprised to see the actors engaged in opposite behavior and cited dispositional factors to explain the targets' constrained behavior, whereas observers of the incongruent sequence indicated that they would be less surprised and cited situational factors to explain the actors' actions. We discuss the implications of these findings and counterfactual thinking for the study of dispositional inference and correspondence bias.