THE USE OF TRAIT CONCEPTIONS TO IDENTIFY OTHER PEOPLES BEHAVIOR AND TO DRAW INFERENCES ABOUT THEIR PERSONALITIES

According to Trope's model, dispositional judgment results from two st ages, behavior identification and dispositional inference. This articl e first reviews research on factors affecting behavior identification- behavior ambiguity, the order of situational and behavioral informatio n, and awareness of alternative meanings of behavior-and then develops the dispositional inference stage theoretically. At this stage, perce ivers evaluate the hypothesis that a target's disposition corresponds to his or her identified behavior by assessing an identified behavior' s diagnosticity and integrating it with prior information. Diagnostici ty derives from causal models of how situations affect individuals of differing dispositions; dispositional hypotheses may be evaluated syst ematically or heuristically. The analysis is then applied to intrinsic and extrinsic inducements, to state and trait inference, and to causa l and noncausal (descriptive) inference.