The Overblown Implications Effect

Abstract

As actors in a social world, people constantly engage in behaviors that put their traits and abilities on stage. But do actors understand the implications of these social performances for how others view them? Seven studies support an overblown implications effect: Actors overestimate how much observers think an actor’s one-off success or failure offers clear insight about the actor’s relevant trait. Actors overestimated how much observers would draw inferences about actors’ intelligence (Study 1), dateability (Study 2), or likeability (Study 3) based on actors’ performance during a trivia quiz, answers during a dating profile video, or exclusion from a particular group, respectively. The OIE emerged because actors failed to understand how observers construed the traits being judged, not because actors did not understand the strength of observers’ priors (Studies 2-3), nor because actors ruminated on their past successes or failures (Study 4). In explaining the OIE, we introduce the construct of working trait definitions — accessible beliefs about what behaviors define a trait. When actors try to adopt observers’ perspective, actors’ attention is drawn to the threat of evaluation, leading the behavior being (or just) performed to seem disproportionately important in defining a trait. This explains why only actors’ guesses about observers’ judgments, not uninvolved bystanders’ guesses, show evidence of the OIE (Study 5), as well as why actors most anxious about social evaluation show the strongest OIE (cross-study meta-analysis). An intervention that broadened actors’ working trait definitions to include other trait-relevant behaviors enhanced the accuracy of actors’ meta-perceptions (Studies 6-7).