Traits as goal-based categories: The importance of goals in the coherence of dispositional categories.

Abstract

It is argued that goals are central to the meaning and structure of many traits and help define the prototypicality structure of those traits. Partly on the basis of Barsalou s (1985) work on goal-derived categories, it was predicted that goals help define the judged prototypicality of many trait-related behaviors and the confidence with which people make trait inferences from those behaviors. Consistent with this hypothesis, ratings of the extent to which behaviors achieved the goal associated with a trait strongly pred icted the typicality of the behaviors. Furthermore, the rated goal-relatedness of a behavior also strongly predicted the confidence with which people would make a trait inference from that behavior. It is suggested that goals play a major role in the conceptual coherence of traits and other social categories. What is a trait? This is a question with a long and disputatious history in psychology, and many different answers have been proposed. Recently, Miller and Read (1987,1990; Read & Miller, 1989b) argued that many traits are goal-based structures, composed of chronic, stable configurations of four components: goals, the plans that can be used to attain those goals, the resources necessary for the successful completion of those plans, and beliefs associated with the trait. Other theorists, from the early days of personality theory (e.g., Allport, 1937; Cattell, 1965; Murray, 1938) to the present (e.g., Alston, 1970, 1975; Carbonell, 1979; John, 1986; Mischel, 1973; Pervin, 1983), have also argued that goals or related concepts such as needs and motives are central to conceptions of many traits and individual differences. The aim of the present article is to provide evidence for the importance of goals as a central component of the conception of many traits and to show that goals play a critical role in the coherence of many dispositional categories. First, we examine whether the goals associated with particular traits play a major role in defining the degree of typicality or goodness of category membership of behaviors associated with those traits. We then examine whether the confidence with which people infer a trait from a behavior is predicted by the goal-relatedness of that behavior.