Mental models of social interactions: How readers comprehend texts about cheating behaviors

A cheating loop is a particular pattern of social exchanges in which two pa rtners, who are bound to one another by a social contract,interact with a t hird person in a way as to cheat the partner. How readers comprehend report s in which such behaviors are factually described was investigated in three experiments. The first experiment demonstrated that relatively minor chang es in a text manipulating the presence or absence of a cheating loop signif icantly influenced the readers' assessment of the described situation. A se ntence verification task showed that the assumed motivational relations beh ind a cheating loop were indeed more strongly agreed to for the experimenta l texts than for the control texts. The second and third experiments demons trated that positive person and positive outcome descriptions may yield low er correctness ratings for a thematic cheating inference than negative pers on and outcome descriptions. The correctness rating for the cheating infere nce were negatively correlated with the judged trustworthiness of the cheat er These results indicate that readers may construct a mental or situation model from a text that in addition to spatial, temporal and causal properti es also represents social inferences.