Authors: David A. Kravitz and Robert S. Wyer, Jr.
Title: The effects of behavioral intentions and consequences on judgments of the actor and other: An S-V-O analysis.
Source: Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 37, 1561-1575. 1979.
Abstract:
An extension of Gollob’s subject-verb-object model of social inference was used
to investigate the effects of information about behavioral intentions and consequences
on judgments of both an actor and the person toward whom the behavior is directed.
Participants received one or more pieces of information about some or all of
the following factors: an attribute of the actor, the actor’s intentions to
help or hinder the other, the actual consequences of this action (whether the
other is helped or hindered), and an attribute of the other. Judgments of actors’
admirableness increased with the favorableness of the adjectives describing
them, the favorableness of both their intentions and the consequences of their
actions, the justness of their intentions and of the consequences of their actions,
and their ability to produce the consequences they intended. Judgments of the
other’s admirableness depended only on the adjectives describing the other and,
when this adjective was not presented, on the consequences of the actor’s behavior
for the other. Behavioral consequences appeared to affect judgments of both
the actor and the other independently of the actor’s intentions. A second experiment
demonstrated that the effects of information on judgments of the actor depend
on the dimension of judgment in predictable ways and suggested that judgments
of admirableness may be mediated by perceptions of both virtuousness and competence.
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