A Functional Analysis of Stages of Spontaneous Impression Formation, Serving Nonconscious Affiliation Goals

Running head: FUNCTIONAL ANALYSIS OF SPONTANEOUS TRAIT INFERENCEIMPRESSIONS A Functional Analysis of Stages of Spontaneous Impression Formation, Trait Inference in Serving Nonconscious Affiliation Goals SoYon Rim New York University Kate E Min Duke University James S Uleman New York University and Tanya L Chartrand Duke University Keywords: impression formation, spontaneous trait inferences, affiliation motivation, attribution, social cognition, social perception Address correspondence to SoYon Rim, Department of Psychology, New York University, Washington Place, Room 766, New York, NY 10003 E-mail: soyon.rim@nyu.edu, Phone: 212-998-7809 Running head: FUNCTIONAL ANALYSIS OF SPONTANEOUS TRAIT INFERENCEIMPRESSIONS Abstract Past research has shown that perceiver motivations can influence explicit impressions (e.g., Goodwin, Fiske, Rosen, & Rosenthal, 2002; Fein & Spencer, 1997) The present research examined the effect of a nonconscious goal to affiliate with others on implicit impressions (i.e., spontaneous trait inferences or STIs) at the two stages of trait activation and binding of traits to specific actors in memory At the earliest activation stage (Experiment 1), we found that an affiliation goal (vs no goal) prime suppressed accessibility of nontrait concepts, which were irrelevant to and hence distracting from the affiliation goal In Experiment 2, we found that priming the goal to affiliate (vs no goal and positive semantic primes) led to selectively greater binding of inferred positive (but not negative) traits to actor representations Experiment provided converging evidence and furtherby showinged that selective implicit binding of positive traits occurs only when a perceiver’s goal to affiliate is unfulfilled (vs fulfilled) Thus, a nonconscious desire to fulfill an affiliation goal led perceivers to suppress accessibility of nontrait concepts, and to spontaneously and selectively form more positive trait inferences about others These studies uncover the underlying machinery of implicit impression formation and pinpoint when positivity biases occur as a result of an affiliation goal In addition, they are the first to provide evidence that STIs are sensitive to perceivers’ nonconscious goals and operate in functional ways in impression formation Running head: FUNCTIONAL ANALYSIS OF SPONTANEOUS TRAIT INFERENCEIMPRESSIONS A Functional Analysis of Spontaneous Trait Inference in Nonconscious Affiliation Goals Imagine that you are meeting the parents of your fiancé for the first time at a family barbeque at their place You observe your future mother-in-law smiling and chatting with all of her guests, tending to everyone’s needs, and engaging all guests, including you But you also observe that she eats with her fingers, knocks over a cup of water, and trips over someone’s foot Do you spontaneously draw the inference that she is sociable and friendly, and also that she is messy and clumsy? Clearly, you would like to become close to your fiancé’s mother How does this motivation automatically shape your attention and the inferences you draw from her behaviors? The purpose of the present research is to investigate this intriguing question We examined the effect of a nonconscious affiliation goal on implicit impression formation at two stages: implicit activation of traits and implicit binding of traits to actors We propose that an affiliation goal initially leads to suppression of trait-unrelated concepts (thus facilitating attention to trait-related concepts), and later to selective formation and binding of positive spontaneous trait inferences (STIs) to representations of actors In the above example, this means that in forming an implicit impression of your future mother-in-law, your attention will first be drawn away from your future mother-in-law’s incidental behaviors (e.g., clearing the plates, taking out the garbage) that not inform your impression, thereby allowing you to focus on the traitimplications relevantof her behaviors, both positive and negative Subsequently, the positive traits (sociable and friendly), but not the negative traits (messy and clumsy), that you spontaneously inferred would become more bound to the rose-colored representation of your future mother-in-law in memory Affiliation Motive and Intentional Impressions Running head: FUNCTIONAL ANALYSIS OF SPONTANEOUS TRAIT INFERENCEIMPRESSIONS In line with the general notion that social thinking serves a practical purpose or that “thinking is for doing” (Fiske, 1992; McArthur & Baron, 1983), past research has shown that goals affect the kinds of impressions that people form of others (Devine, Sedikides, & Fuhrman, 1989; Fein & Spencer, 1997; Clark & Wegener, 2008; Goodwin et al., 2002; Scholer & Higgins, 2008) Goals can lead a perceiver to be positively biased in their impressions as in the case of affiliation-related goals (Clark & Wegener, 2008; Goodwin et al., 2002) But they can also lead to more negatively biased impressions when the perceiver is motivated to self-enhance, as demonstrated by the large body of literature on the effect of self-esteem threat and goals in general on stereotyping of others (Fein, Hoshino-Browne, Davies, & Spencer, 2003; Fein & Spencer, 1997; Gilbert & Hixon, 1991; Sinclair & Kunda, 2000; Spencer, Fein, Wolfe, Fong, & Dunn, 1998; for reviews, see Blair, 2002 and Kunda & Spencer, 2003) Most relevant, however, for the present research is work on the effect of affiliation-related goals on impression formation Goodwin et al (2002) examined the effect of romantic goals on explicit evaluations of goal-relevant and –irrelevant characteristics Participants watched a video presentation made by a person who they believed was a prospective date (vs a random person) and subsequently rated the target on various goal-relevant (e.g., social) vs goal-irrelevant (e.g., presentation competence) qualities Half of the participants viewed a video of a competent actor (i.e., in terms of presentation skills) and the other half saw an incompetent actor Subsequently, participants were asked to rate the actor on various dimensions related to competence and sociability Results showed that participants rated task-competent and –incompetent prospective dates as equally competent, thus showing a positivity bias Participants also rated the actor more favorably on various social qualities when the actor was (vs was not) a prospective date, irrespective of manipulated task-competence Murray and colleagues reported similar positivity biases in the Running head: FUNCTIONAL ANALYSIS OF SPONTANEOUS TRAIT INFERENCEIMPRESSIONS evaluation of romantic partners within the context of close relationships (Murray & Holmes, 1993; Murray, Holmes, & Griffin, 1996) Similarly, past research has shown that dependencey on another person for desired outcomes leads to a positivity bias in intentional impressions (Berscheid, Graziano, Monson, & Dermer, 1976; Clark & Wegener, 2008) Clark and Wegener (2008, Experiment 2) recently demonstrated that people evaluate others more positively when they expect to interact with them and when a smooth interaction ensures a larger monetary reward Also, Berscheid et al (1976) manipulated outcome dependency in a dating context and found that participants attended more to targets they expected to date (as assessed by looking time), remembered more information about them, and rated them more positively on various trait measures (e.g., warm-cold, sensitiveinsensitive) than targets they did not expect to date Thus, past work on goals’ effects on explicit trait judgments and evaluations demonstrates that perceivers’ momentary goals are important in shaping intentional impressions However, impression formation in daily life occurs, for the most part, spontaneously and passively, without external instructions to form impressions, and without perceivers ever having to explicitly verbalize those impressions In addition, in navigating a highly complex social environment, the perceiver must often make sense of social information quickly and efficiently, without draining valuable cognitive resources Therefore, it is critical to examine the implicit processes that underlie the explicit judgments and evaluations that have been studied thus far When positivity biases in impression formation arise as a result of an affiliation goal? Do these biases surface at the level of automatic trait activation? Or they manifest at the later stage of implicit trait binding to actor representations in memory? It is also possible that implicit trait impressions are impervious to such goal manipulations and that an affiliation goal only biases later, Running head: FUNCTIONAL ANALYSIS OF SPONTANEOUS TRAIT INFERENCEIMPRESSIONS intentional judgments, such as the ones that have been previously studied (Berscheid et al., 1976; Clark & Wegener, 2008; Goodwin et al., 2002).? Thus, the present research is a contribution in two respects: 1) it takes a process-focused approach to the study of an affiliation goal’s effects on impressions and examines when positivity biases arise duringin the impression formation process, and 2) it sheds light on whether implicit impressions, namely spontaneous trait inferences formed from behaviors, are sensitive to temporarily activated social goals, such as the goal to affiliate Spontaneous Trait Inferences Spontaneous trait inferences (STIs; for a review, see Uleman, Saribay, & Gonzalez, 2008) are inferences that people form upon reading (e.g., Carlston & Skowronski, 1994; Todorov & Uleman, 2002) or observing (Fiedler & Schenk, 2001; Fiedler, Schenk, Watling, & Menges, 2005) other people’s trait-implying behaviors For instance, while reading the sentence, “He returned the wallet with all the money in it,” people have been shown to spontaneously generate the inference, “honest.” Such STIs form in the absence of any explicit task instructions to form impressions, as participants are usually given memory instructions, and without perceivers’ explicit awareness of having formed any inferences And STI effects are robust, occurring under various conditions thought to interfere with the trait-encoding process, such as concurrent cognitive load (Todorov & Uleman, 2003; Winter, Uleman, & Cunniff, 1984) STI formation has been indirectly assessed using a number of different paradigms, including the lexical decision tasks, recognition probes, savings-in-relearning, and the false recognition paradigms (for a review, see Uleman, Newman, & Moskowitz, 1996) The apparent ubiquity and robustness of spontaneous trait inferences (Todorov & Uleman, 2002; Winter, Uleman, & Cunniff, 1985) makes it unclear whether they are sensitive to Running head: FUNCTIONAL ANALYSIS OF SPONTANEOUS TRAIT INFERENCEIMPRESSIONS temporarily activated social motivations of the perceiver In fact, Uleman (1999) speculated that “spontaneous impressions are guided more by chronically accessible constructs, while intentional impressions are guided more by temporarily activated goal-relevant constructs and procedures” and that “spontaneous impressions are less focused, more wide-ranging, and more promiscuous, whereas intentional impressions are focused” (p 146) Indeed, STIs have been shown to be sensitive to chronically activated goal constructs (Zelli, Cervone, & Huesmann, 1996; Zelli, Huesmann, & Cervone, 1995; Moskowitz, 1993; Newman, 1991; Zárate, Uleman, & Voils, 2001) For example, Moskowitz (1993) found that people who scored high on personal need for structure (PNS; Neuberg & Newsom, 1993), a desire for certainty and aversion to ambiguity, formed more STIs from behaviors than those low on PNS And although past research has shown that STIs are affected by task instructions that alter the processing of STIs (Uleman & Moskowitz, 1994), these manipulations not speak to the issue of functionality Thus, it is possible that spontaneous trait inferences are unaffected by temporarily activated social goals and that goals’ effects manifest only during at the stage of intentional impressions But this may not be true Recently, Rim, Uleman, and Trope (2009) provided indirect evidence that STI formation can be modulated by contextual information that makes STIs more or less functional in forming impressions From the same behavioral information, participants formed STIs to a greater extent about actors who were from the distant (vs near) past or located in a remote (vs proximal) place These results were consistent with construal level theory (CLT; Trope & Liberman, 2010), which predicts a functional and associative relationship between psychological distance and level of construal According to CLT, distal (vs proximal) others are represented more in terms of their high-level (i.e., abstract and central) features, which make STIs more likely for distal vs proximal entities Underlying this is a functional relationship Running head: FUNCTIONAL ANALYSIS OF SPONTANEOUS TRAIT INFERENCEIMPRESSIONS between distance and construal in which high-level, abstract construals are more useful for representing distal objects, events, and people Rim et al (2009) postulated that STIs are more functional for representing distant others because the specifics of the immediate situation (e.g., exact behaviors) may not always hold for those individuals Abstract traits are more stable and invariant with psychological distance and hence are more useful in representing distal people Although such a functional relationship seems reasonable, these studies did not unequivocally directly show that STIs can be flexibly formed according to their functionality in the moment Stages of Spontaneous Trait Inference Formation Spontaneous trait inference formation occurs in two stages: 1) activation of trait concepts from behavioral information implying traits (for a review of concept activation, see Förster & Liberman, 2007) and 2) “binding” or linking of inferred traits to actor representations in long term memory (Carlston & Skowronski, 1994; Skowronski, Carlston, & Hartnett, 2008; Zárate, Uleman, & Voils, 2001) Under certain conditions, traits might be inferred (activated) but not bound to actors, while in other cases they will be inferred and bound to the appropriate actors At what stage of the impression formation process does might an affiliation goal have its influence? Our prediction is that an affiliation goal will affect both stages of spontaneous trait inference formation, but in different ways Activation Traits are spontaneously activated upon exposure to trait-implying behaviors of an actor, and this activation can be assessed using procedures such as lexical decision, recognition probe, or word-stem completion (e.g., Ham & Vonk, 2003; Uleman, Hon, Roman, & Moskowitz, 1996; Zárate, Uleman, & Voils, 2001) When behaviors have both trait and situational implications, research has shown that both meanings are simultaneously activated and selection based on contextual goals is made later in making intentional judgments (Todd, Running head: FUNCTIONAL ANALYSIS OF SPONTANEOUS TRAIT INFERENCEIMPRESSIONS Molden, Ham, & Vonk, 2010) Furthermore, in text comprehension, concepts (e.g., bug) with multiple meanings initially activate all other concepts (e.g., ant and spy) related to them and sSuppression of concepts irrelevant to a particular context occursonly after some delay (Swinney, 1979; Gernsbacher & Faust, 1991) Based on this body of evidence on activation of concepts, we predicted that an affiliation goal will lead to increased activation of traits, both positive and negative, which are relevant for forming impressions However, goals not only heighten activation of goal-relevant stimuli, but suppress activation of goal-irrelevant stimuli (for a review, see Dijksterhuis & Aarts, 2010) Therefore, we also predicted that an affiliation goal will lead to increased suppression of trait-unrelated concepts Binding Activated traits can then be bound (or not) to actor representations and stored in long term memory Binding can be assessed using the savings-in-relearning paradigm (Carlston & Skowronski, 1994) or the false recognition paradigm (Todorov & Uleman, 2002) In the false recognition paradigm, which we use in this research, participants initially study photographs of actors paired with trait-implying behavioral sentences about them Later, they are shown the same actors’ photos, some correctly paired with the pictured actor’s implied trait (from previous behaviors), and others incorrectly paired with another actor’s implied trait On a recognition test, participants are more likely to falsely recognize implied traits as having been presented in the earlier behavioral sentences when photos are correctly (vs incorrectly) paired with the right actor This provides strong evidence that traits are bound to specific actor representations Unlike simple activation, we predicted a positivity bias will to occur for in terms of implicit trait binding as assessed using this procedure AThat is, an affiliation goal should will lead to greater positive spontaneous trait inference formation and binding, but have no effect on negative STIs The Present Research Running head: FUNCTIONAL ANALYSIS OF SPONTANEOUS TRAIT INFERENCEIMPRESSIONS 10 The purpose of the present research is to 1) examine different stages of the implicit impression formation process to pinpoint if and when positivity biases arise as a result of an affiliation goal and 2) to provide direct evidence that spontaneous trait inferences form flexibly depending on their functionality for activated perceiver goals In Experiment 1, we primed people with the goal to affiliate or no goal and measured implicit activation of trait vs nontrait (control) words and nonwords in a lexical decision task We predicted that an affiliation goal (vs no goal) would lead to greater activation of trait concepts and greater suppression of traitunrelated concepts In Experiment 2, we examined implicit binding of traits to actors In addition to the affiliation goal and no goal primes, we also included a positive semantic prime as a way to distinguish between the positivity of the affiliation goal and the goal itself Since our prediction was that an affiliation goal would lead to a positivity bias in implicit impressions, we wanted to rule out the possibility that this would occur simply because the affiliation goal primes general positivity rather than the goal to affiliate Participants were in one of three prime conditions: affiliation goal, no goal, and positive semantic Subsequently, we assessed binding of positive and negative traits to specific actors We predicted that at this later stage of implicit impression formation, perceivers with the goal to affiliate would spontaneously bind to actors more of the positive traits they inferred relative to those with no goal or those primed with positivity This effect of prime was not predicted for STIs from negative behaviors Experiment was conducted to provide unequivocal evidence that an affiliation goal leads to a positivity bias in implicit binding of spontaneous trait inferences to actors In this study, we examined the effect of a goal prime and goal fulfillment on STI formation from positive and negative behaviors We predicted that the positivity bias found in Experiment Running head: 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Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 49, 904-917 Zárate, M A., Uleman, J S., & Voils, C I (2001) Effects of culture and processing goals on the activation and binding of trait concepts Social Cognition (special issue on culture and cognition), 19, 295-323 Running head: FUNCTIONAL ANALYSIS OF SPONTANEOUS TRAIT INFERENCEIMPRESSIONS 40 Zelli, A., Cervone, D., & Huesmann, L R (1996) Behavioral experience and social inference: individual differences in aggressive experience and spontaneous versus deliberate trait inference Social Cognition, 14, 165–190 Zelli, A., Huesmann, L R., & Cervone, D (1995) Social inference and individual differences in aggression: Evidence for spontaneous judgments of hostility Aggressive Behavior, 21, 405–417 Running head: FUNCTIONAL ANALYSIS OF SPONTANEOUS TRAIT INFERENCEIMPRESSIONS 41 Figure Mean lexical-decision latencies for trait words, control words, and nonwords (Experiment 1) Error bars show standard errors Running head: FUNCTIONAL ANALYSIS OF SPONTANEOUS TRAIT INFERENCEIMPRESSIONS 42 Figure Mean lexical-decision latencies for trait words and control words as a function of prime (Experiment 1) Running head: FUNCTIONAL ANALYSIS OF SPONTANEOUS TRAIT INFERENCEIMPRESSIONS 43 Figure Mean proportion of yes responses false recognition of traits as a function of trial type (Experiment 2) These are false recognition rates for experimental and control trials, and correct recognition for fillers Running head: FUNCTIONAL ANALYSIS OF SPONTANEOUS TRAIT INFERENCEIMPRESSIONS 44 Figure Mean proportion of false recognition of positive traits as a function of prime and trial type (Experiment 2) STI formation is indicated by the magnitude of the difference in false recognition rates on experimental vs control trials Running head: FUNCTIONAL ANALYSIS OF SPONTANEOUS TRAIT INFERENCEIMPRESSIONS 45 Figure Mean proportion of yes responses false recognition of traits as a function of trial type (Experiment 3) These are false recognition rates for experimental and control trials, and correct recognition for fillers Running head: FUNCTIONAL ANALYSIS OF SPONTANEOUS TRAIT INFERENCEIMPRESSIONS 46 Figure Mean proportion of false recognition of positive traits as a function of prime and trial type in the goal-unfulfilled condition (Experiment 3) STI formation is indicated by the magnitude of the difference in false recognition rates on experimental vs control trials Running head: FUNCTIONAL ANALYSIS OF SPONTANEOUS TRAIT INFERENCEIMPRESSIONS 47 Figure Mean proportion of false recognition of positive traits as a function of prime and trial type in the goal-fulfilled condition (Experiment 3) STI formation is indicated by the magnitude of the difference in false recognition rates on experimental vs control trials ... formation Running head: FUNCTIONAL ANALYSIS OF SPONTANEOUS TRAIT INFERENCEIMPRESSIONS A Functional Analysis of Spontaneous Trait Inference in Nonconscious Affiliation Goals Imagine that you are... goal manipulations and that an affiliation goal only biases later, Running head: FUNCTIONAL ANALYSIS OF SPONTANEOUS TRAIT INFERENCEIMPRESSIONS intentional judgments, such as the ones that have... judgments and evaluations that have been studied thus far When positivity biases in impression formation arise as a result of an affiliation goal? Do these biases surface at the level of automatic trait