关键词: 自发特质推理, 贫富, 知觉者, 行为者, 社会认知

Abstract: Spontaneous trait inferences (STIs) are trait inferences that occur unintentionally, almost effortlessly, and usually without awareness, simply from exposure to behaviors that imply traits.. Prior research has demonstrated that STIs the salient features(e.g., gender) of both the actors and perceivers influence the formation of STIs. Money is a fundamental part of our social life and has been found to have profound effects on people’s thoughts, feelings, motivations, and behaviors. However, little attention has been paid to whether the perceivers' and actors' rich or poor states affect the formation of individuals’ STIs. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to examine the influence of the perceivers' and actors' rich or poor states on individuals’ STIs. To be specific, using a probe recognition paradigm, three studies were performed to examine the influence of perceivers’ and actors’ rich or poor states on STIs. Study 1 examined the effects of the perceivers’ rich and poor states on the formation of STIs. Participants were randomly assigned to one of two conditions that were manipulated in two steps. Each participant first played the board game Monopoly with a experimenter. After 7 min, the game was cleared except for differing amounts of play money. Participants in the high-money condition were left with a large amount of Monopoly money($2000),and participants in the low-money condition were left with restricted amount of Monopoly money ($50). For high and low-money participants, the play money remained in view for the second part of the manipulation. At this step, participants were asked to imagine a future with abundant finances (high money) or with strained finances (low money). Finally, all the participants completed a memory task. It was found that participants with high money priming (the rich perceiver) were more likely to draw STIs from behaviors than participants with low money priming (the poor perceiver). Study 2 examined whether the rich/poor stereotypes associated with the actor’s rich/poor states influence the formation of STIs, and found that for the rich actor, the participants were more likely to draw STIs from the rich stereotype-consistent behaviors than from the rich stereotype-inconsistent behaviors, however, participants did not make STIs from the poor actor’s behaviors regardless of their consistency with the poor stereotypes . Study 3 further examined the interactive effects of the perceivers’ and actors’ rich or poor states on the STIs. The results showed that compared with the participants with low money priming, participants with high money priming were more likely to draw STIs from the rich stereotype-consistent behaviors than from the rich stereotype-inconsistent behaviors, indicating that the rich perceivers, but not the poor perceivers, is more likely be influenced by the stereotypes of the rich when they draw STIs. The current study is the first to show that indivituals’ rich and poor states have significant influences on their implicit impression formation, and provided new evidence for the flexible formation of STIs.

Key words: Spontaneous trait inferences, the rich&poor, perceiver, actor, social cognition