The proposed work is part of an ongoing research program that investigates the effects of cognitive busyness (a state in which an individual's information-processing resources are depleted by concurrent demanding tasks) on social inference processes. My past research has argued for a multiple-stage model of trait inference in which successive stages require increasing amounts of conscious attention. As such, cognitive busyness renders perceivers unable to complete late stages in the information-processing sequence, and thus causes them to draw inappropriate inferences about others. The present proposal describes three major areas of new research concentration. First, the proposal describes some new data that suggest that the original model is overly constrained, and offers a series of experiments that will allow me to expand the model in a variety of important ways. Second, the proposal describes a series of experiments that attempt to apply this model of trait inference in other-perception to a variety of problems in self-perception. Third, the proposal describes a series of experiments that seek to construe social comparison as the interaction of self-perception and other-perception processes. Each of these studies seeks to elucidate the role of conscious control in the process of attributional inference, and promises to extend previous work to new and consequential domains.
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