Savings in the relearning of trait information as evidence for spontaneous inference generation.

Abstract

Five experiments used a relearning paradigm to determine whether people spontaneously make trait inferences from behavior descriptions. In each experiment, Ss learned actors' traits more readily after prior exposure to congruent descriptive stimuli (a "savings effect"), suggesting that implicit trait knowledge had been distilled from those descriptions. Moreover, this savings effect (a) was unaffected by Ss' processing objectives, (b) persisted for as long as a week after stimulus presentation, (c) occurred even when the original stimuli could not be recognized, and (d) could not be accounted for by priming mechanisms or differential familiarity with experimental materials. This evidence thus suggests that people do spontaneously derive trait knowledge from behavioral stimuli.

Spontaneous trait inferences are bound to actors' faces: Evidence from a false recognition paradigm.

“…The six experiments using the false recognition paradigm provide convergent evidence with the savings paradigm (Carlston & Skowronski, 1994;Carlston et al, 1995) that STIs are bound to actors' faces in long-term memory. We stressed the differences between the savings and the false recognition paradigms in the introduction of this article.…”

“…However, Carlston and Skowronski (1994) did not find differences between impression instructions and other instructions, such as familiarization with the material and memorization, in five experiments using the savings paradigm. This was the case even when the impression instructions were trait focused (e.g., "Think about a specific trait that would describe the person's personality").…”

“…Work by Park (1989) suggests that pairing multiple traitimplying sentences with a face is sufficient to trigger impression formation goals. In fact, several experiments with the savings paradigm failed to find differences between memory and impression formation instructions (Carlston & Skowronski, 1994). Second, in the savings paradigm, the trait inferences and the learning task demands act in the same direction.…”

“…Evidence for Actor-Trait Links From Implicit Tasks Carlston, Skowronski, and their colleagues (Carlston & Skowronski, 1994;Carlston et al, 1995) have provided the most extensive evidence for actor-trait links using an implicit paradigm. In their savings in relearning paradigm, participants initially familiarize themselves with a series of facial photos paired with traitimplying paragraphs.…”

Sowing the seeds of stereotypes: Spontaneous inferences about groups.

“…Adapting the savings-in-relearning inference paradigm (Carlston & Skowronski, 1994), Crawford et al (2002) studied how behavioral information about individual members of a group is integrated into a global group representation, and how, once formed, this impression is applied to other group members. Participants read about behaviors performed by members of two different groups, A and B, and all behaviors implied specific personality traits.…”