Savings in the relearning of trait information as evidence for spontaneous inference generation

Abstract

Five experiments used a relearning paradigm to determine whether people spontaneously make trait inferences from behavior descriptions. In each experiment, Ss learned actors'traits more readily after prior exposure to congruent descriptive stimuli (a «savings effect»), suggesting that implicit trait knowledge had been distilled from those descriptions. Moreover, this savings effect (a) was unaffected by Ss' processing objectives, (b) persisted for as long as a week after stimulus presentation, (c) occurred even when the original stimuli could not be recognized, and (d) could not be accounted for by priming mechanisms or differential familiarity with experimental materials. This evidence thus suggests that people do spontaneously derive trait knowledge from behavioral stimuli