State dispositions in social judgment

Abstract

Social judgment is a joint function of judge disposition and stimulus information. Dispositions may take the form of enduring traits or of transient states. This experiment was aimed at establishing the extent of correspondence between dispositional traits and states in their effects on judgments of stimulus persons. States were induced by optimistic or pessimistic news broadcasts. Subjects evaluated a confederate who predominantly agreed or disagreed with them on either three or six attitudinal issues. Induced states affected judgments of others, but the pattern of interaction with stimulus cues (others’ attitudes or descriptions) differed from that shown in earlier studies of dispositional traits. As in studies using trait-derived dispositions, the effect of state dispositions was uniform across different valences of stimulus information. Unlike the case with trait dispositions, states did not decrease in impact with larger amounts of information. States and traits of the judge cannot therefore be considered conceptually equivalent in their role in social judgment.