Automatic goal inferences

The social psychological literature on automatic social inferences has focused on one construct that helps explaining human behavior—traits (e.g., Gilbert, Pelham, & Krull, 1988; Trope, 1986; Winter & Uleman, 1984). The dispositional roots of behavior, however, go beyond relatively stable constructs such as traits to include more transient causes such as one s intentions and goals. Evidence from young infants and adult chimpanzees, knowledge acquired in the text-comprehension literature and hypotheses derived from the Automatic Causal Inferences framework (Hassin, Bargh, & Uleman, 2002), seems to converge: they all suggest that perceivers may automatically infer goals from behaviors. This paper reports four studies that examine this hypothesis. The first two use surprise cued-recall, and look at goal inferences when the road to goal achievement seems straightforward and when it seems blocked. Studies 3 and 4 use on-line methodologies—probe recognition task and lexical decision—to examine whether these inferences are made at encoding. 2004 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.