Gifford

The authors examined the roles of chronic expectancies and other contextual information in the dispositional inference process within the domain of ability judgments. Prior to viewing a vid-eotaped performance under either cognitive load or no load, par-ticipants in Studies 1 and 2 were given additional information designed to constrain their categorizations of the performance. In Study 2, chronic future-event expectancies also were assessed. Analyses revealed that when under cognitive load, participants’ ability inferences were assimilated to the constraint information (Studies 1 and 2) and to chronic expectancies (Study 2). Fur-thermore, Study 2 analyses revealed that these effects were medi-ated by participants ’ behavior categorizations. Evidence sugges-tive of a proceduralized form of correction for task difficulty (Studies 1 and 2) and an effortful, awareness-based correction for the constraint information and for chronic expectancies als