Honesty and Intelligence Judgments of Individuals and Groups: the Effects of Entity-related Behavior Diagnosticity and Implicit Theories

Two experiments examined trait judgments made from behaviors. Results from an initial experiment suggest that the informativeness of the behaviors, and not peoples’ affective responses or approach/avoidance tendencies, best account for the impact of inconsistent information on trait judgments. The results of a second experiment yielded additional support for this idea by showing that when a target’s behaviors were inconsistent in their trait implications: (1) negativity effects emerged in judgments of the target’s honesty; (2) positivity effects emerged in judgments of the target’s intelligence; (3) these effects diminished when the targets were groups rather than individuals; and (4) judgments made by entity theorists were less affected by inconsistent behavior than judgments made by incremental theorists. These effects did not emerge when a target’s behaviors were consistent in their implications. Collectively, these results suggest that the usefulness of a behavior for a trait judgment depends on whether the judgment situation prompts participants to evaluate the extent to which a target fits a single trait category or forces a calculation of the target’s relative fit to alternative trait categories. The results also suggest that some aspects of trait judgments cannot be explained by evaluative responses to behaviors or to targets.