The suspicious mind.

Nine experiments that were designed to begin a systematic investigation of the psychological state of suspicion and to explore the effects of this state on the inferences that perceivers draw from an actor's behavior are reported. These studies offer converging evidence supporting the characterization of suspicion of ulterior motives as a state reflecting active, relatively sophisticated attributional thinking. Studies 1 and 2 demonstrated that subjects who read contextual information that suggested implicitly that an actor's behavior may have been influenced by ulterior motives were significantly more likely than were subjects who read contextual information that indicated that the actor's behavior was constrained by strong situational forces to mention thoughts about the situational influences on the actor's behavior and to avoid making inferences about the actor that reflected the correspondence bias (a.k.a. the fundamental attribution error) in their responses both to open-ended and relatively general questions about the actor and to more specific questions about the actor's true attitude. Studies 3, 4, and 5 demonstrated that subjects who were led to suspect the motives of an actor in one situation were significantly more likely than other subjects to avoid falling prey to the correspondence bias when they made inferences about a different actor whose behavior was constrained by strong situational forces, but they were as likely as the subjects who had not been led to be suspicious of the first actor to make strong correspondent inferences about the second actor when the contextual information about him did not suggest that his behavior was influenced by situational factors. Studies 6, 7, 8, and 9 demonstrated that suspicion about the motives of an actor about whom a negative expectancy exists can interfere with the processes of expectancy disconfirmation, and these studies illustrated the important role that variations in the plausibility of ulterior-motive explanations can play in these processes. An account of the processes that lead to the correspondence bias, specifically, and to drawing dispositional inferences from an actor's behavior, more generally, is proposed, and a number of the positive and negative consequences that suspicion should have are discussed.PhDPsychologyUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/105529/1/9135595.pdfDescription of 9135595.pdf : Restricted to UM users only