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 informat ion about a film actor's personality would infer correspondent disposi tions from a role he played in a film, and second, the impact these ju dgments have on subsequent dispositional judgments made from constrain ed behavior of different targets. In both experiments, observers recei ved a fictitious description of the primary actor as either interperso nally warm and sensitive or interpersonally cold and callous. Observer s then watched one of two clips-depicting the primary actor playing a role that was either congruent or incongruent with the description the y had received-taken from his films. Finally, observers rated the prim ary actor's true personality. Results showed that observers who watche d a congruent film clip provided significantly more extreme correspond ent dispositional ratings than did subjects who saw an incongruent cli p. Following the ratings of the primary actor, all observers watched o ther targets engaged in constrained behavior. Observers who had receiv ed congruent information about the primary actor, especially when that information was uniformly positive, provided significantly more extre me correspondent dispositional ratings of these subsequent targets tha n did observers who had previously received incongruent information. F urther, these observers indicated that they would be more surprised to see the actors engaged in opposite behavior and cited dispositional f actors to explain the targets' constrained behavior, whereas observers of the incongruent sequence indicated that they would be less surpris ed and cited situational factors to explain the actors' actions. We di scuss the implications of these findings and counterfactual thinking f or the study of dispositional inference and correspondence bias.