| Budget Amount *help |
¥3,200,000 (Direct Cost: ¥3,200,000)
Fiscal Year 2005: ¥800,000 (Direct Cost: ¥800,000)
Fiscal Year 2004: ¥1,100,000 (Direct Cost: ¥1,100,000)
Fiscal Year 2003: ¥1,300,000 (Direct Cost: ¥1,300,000)
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| Research Abstract |
Most theories of social inference put emphasis on person-situation distinction, but situations have attracted much less research attention than persons. This research aimed at exploring the psychological meanings of the situations and classifying them in terms of their impact on social inference. Five studies were conducted for this purpose. In Study 1, participants' ratings of situational strength and constraint were put into cluster analysis to find three types of situations, private and comfortable, public and anonymous, and tense and constraining. Study 2 extended the scope to include emotional meanings of situations. Factor analysis and multidimensional scaling were conducted to extract relevant dimensions and to obtain configuration of each situation. Three experimental studies, Study 3, 4 and 5 dealt with the role of situations in social inference. In Study 3, participants were asked to infer actors' dispositions from brief descriptions of behaviors. As the descriptions suggeste
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d that target behaviors were done at some situational instigation, participants should have difficulty in drawing correspondent inferences. However, results indicated that participants make correspondent inferences from behaviors, even when they fully understood the strength of the situations. In Study 4, situational inferences were examined directly along with dispositional inferences. For each target behavior, there were both personal and situational causes that could easily come to mind. Results suggested that strong situational inferences were made for emotional behaviors, whereas dispositional inferences were predominant for ability-related performances. Study 5 was a laboratory experiment using visual stimulus. Participants watched video-recorded conversation between two persons and answered several questions including recall measures. It was hypothesized that participants who were personally involved would direct more attention to the situation and would be more willing to make situational inferences. However, this hypothesis was not supported, though involved participants seemed to be more attentive generally. Less
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