People make social inferences without intentions, awareness, or effort, i.e., spontaneously. We review recent findings on spontaneous social inferences (especially traits, goals, and causes) and closely related phenomena. We then describe current thinking on some of the most relevant processes, implicit knowledge, and theories. These include automatic and controlled processes and their interplay; embodied cognition, including mimicry; and associative versus rule-based processes. Implicit knowledge includes adult folk theories, conditions of personhood, self-knowledge to simulate others, and cultural and social class differences. Implicit theories concern Bayesian networks, recent attribution research, and questions about the utility of the disposition-situation dichotomy. Developmental research provides new insights. Spontaneous social inferences include a growing array of phenomena, but they have been insufficiently linked to other phenomena and theories. We hope the links suggested in this review begin to remedy this.

The authors selected 8 ordered quantities from smallest (1st) to largest (8th) from each of 36 domains, such as population of countries and production of commodities. Given the 1st and 8th (broad domain boundaries), 2nd and 7th (medium boundaries), 3rd and 6th (narrow boundaries), 2nd and 3rd, 6th and 7th, or none of the quantities, participants estimated the 4th and 5th quantities from each domain. They then repeated the estimations as 3-person groups or individuals. The groups performed at the level of their best members and better than the independent individuals. All 5 domain boundaries improved estimation for both groups and individuals. Estimations were most accurate given the narrow (3rd and 6th) boundaries, suggesting processes of assimilation rather than averaging.

Estimation tasks typically fall between the extremes of the intellective-judgmental task continuum. To the extent that these tasks are intellective, models predicting intragroup influence on the basis of the accuracy of proposed alternatives should provide better fit (analogous to the "truth wins" social decision scheme). To the extent that these tasks are judgmental, models predicting influence on the basis of the centrality (i.e., intragroup "averageness") of alternatives should provide better fit. Thus 2 competing hypotheses are plausible. Findings from 2 studies indicate support for the latter hypothesis. For both studies, both a median-based model and an exponentially weighted centrality model adequately fit the obtained group judgments.

Recent research has suggested that young children have relatively well-developed trait concepts. However, this literature overlooks potential age-related differences in children's appreciation of the fundamentally dimensional nature of traits. In Study 1, we presented 4-, 5-, and 7-year-old children and adults with sets of characters and asked them to indicate the preferences of a target character who shared appearance attributes with one character (appearance match) and shared a common trait with the other character (trait match). Traits were presented in a way that emphasized either their categorical or their dimensional nature. When the dimensional nature of trait terms was emphasized, the youngest children made fewer trait-based inferences, and the use of traits increased with age. In Study 2, we gave 4-year-old children and adults the same task except that the extent to which appearance cues could serve as a meaningful basis of judgment was varied. Results were consistent with the findings of Study 1, although children were more likely to rely on dimensional presentations of traits in the absence of strong appearance cues. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved).

No abstract