We frequently expect those we interact with to have in certain ways, to exhibit particular personality characteristics, or to demonstrate certain abilities or skills. Even when our interpersonal expectancies are inaccurate, we nonetheless may form post-interaction impressions of others that are consistent with these expectancies. Such biased impression may be especially damaging when they result from negative social sterotypes and prejudices (e.g., toward the mentally ill, ethnic groups, the elderly, AIDS victims, etc.), and may serve to reinforce the initial negative expectancies. Although much work has investigated the processes that underlie expectancy confirmation, little research has attempted to identify those factors that determine when expectancy confirmation occurs and when it does not. Based on an analysis of the behavioral an cognitive mediators of the expectancy-confirmation process, I present a model of expectancy- tinged dyadic social interaction in which people's impression formation and self-presentational goals are posited to maturate expectancy confirmation. The model is based upon four primary premises: (1) Perceiver impression formation goals moderate expectancy confirmation by regulating expectancy influences on perceiver information-gathering behaviors and attentional and interpretational processes; (2) perceiver self-presentational goals moderate the expectancy confirmation process by regulating expectancy influences on perceiver expressive behaviors, information-gathering behaviors, and attentional and interpretational processes; (3) target self-presentational goals moderate expectancy confirmation by influencing the extent to which targets decide to accommodate the perceiver's interfactional script; and (4) the allocation of behavioral and cognitive resources determines the extent to which perceiver and target goals can effectively moderate the impact of expectancies. Presently-funded work has focused successfully on Premises 1 and 2; this continuation proposal thus moves to further test the model by outlining eight additional experiments--focusing on Premise 3, on Premise 4, and on combinatorial effects of the four premises. In all studies, theoretically-relevant goals and expectancies are manipulated within the context of relatively unconstrained social interactions ar manipulated within the context of relatively unconstrained social interactions. Moreover, to assess the possible existence of individual differences in the tendency to form strong expectancies, a personality inventory will be developed across three additional studies, and the ability of such differences to moderate the expectancy-confirmation process will be investigated.
