Twenty-five years of research suggests that perceivers tend to draw dispositional inferences from behavior (e.g., Jones, 1990). However, recent research suggests that perceivers can draw situational inferences initially (e.g., Krull, 1993; Krull & Dill, under review). It is hypothesized that: (1) Perceivers' initial inference (either dispositional or situational) may be influenced by the current circumstances, or their default focus on either dispositional or situational factors, and (2) Perceivers in independent cultures and perceivers in interdependent cultures differ in their initial inferences in that, relative to one another, independent perceivers draw more dispositional inferences spontaneously and interdependent perceivers draw more situational inferences spontaneously. Moreover, it is expected that this cultural difference derives from differences in default inferential focus. A reaction time paradigm similar to that of Smith and Miller (1983) will be used to investigate these hypotheses. The proposed investigations seek to explain the mechanisms that produce cross-cultural differences and provide a model of social inference that will incorporate the inference processes of perceivers in both independent and interdependent cultures. As such, the proposed model can serve as a framework for the understanding of current findings and can also suggest new directions for social inference and attribution researchers. More generally, the judgments people draw about others have implications for fields other than social psychology, including political science, sociology, and education. For example, if Bob concludes that a homeless person is lazy (a dispositional inference), he may be less likely to offer help than if he concludes that the person is a victim of cutbacks (a situational inference). Similarly, when people blame victims for their misfortunes (a dispositional inference), this may impair those victims' ability to recover from their traumatic experience (Burt, 1978). In short, the proposed research may not only illuminate the process by which perceivers in many cultures draw inferences about their neighbors, but may also contribute to an understanding of how people think about such ubiquitous social problems as poverty, crime, and discrimination.
