MILLER, JONES, & HINKLE (1981): Correspondence bias
in personality attributions and under different instructional sets.

• Method:
  
  
  • Subjects: Participating in the study were 95 Miami University (of Ohio) undergraduates. Sixty four were females and thirty one males. The study was conducted in groups of 6-11 subjects each.
    
    
  • Procedure:
    
    
    • Subjects were assigned to one of four conditions defined by the crossing of two independent variables: personality trait (extraversion vs. introversion) and instructional set (framing given to the essay, as elaborated below).
      
      
    • Subjects were first asked to rate themselves on an extraversion-introversion dimension. (These terms were defined for the subjects.)
      
      
    • Subjects were then randomly assigned to extraversion or introversion essay conditions. In the extraversion condition, subjects were asked to write an essay that would convince a reader that they were "extreme extraverts" (regardless of what they really were). In the introversion condition subjects were asked to write an essay describing themselves as "extreme introverts." Note that the focus here is on personality traits, not attitudes.
      
      
    • The experimenter then collected and shuffled those essays, and gave another's essay to each person in the group.
      
      
    • (Yes this is getting complicated, but hang in there!) Just prior to this essay exchange, the researchers manipulated the instructional set. Half the subjects received the Individuation Set, which means they were told the experiment was about "How good people are at forming accurate first impressions of a target person when they have different amounts and kinds of information about the target person." Note that this instructional set is similar to that used in the basic Jones and Harris paradigm.
      
      The other half of the subjects received the Constraint Set. They were told this was an experiment on "How people's behavior is affected by the different situations in which they might find themselves" and that the subjects were being asked "to help determine the role of constraining instructions in making it difficult to understand what the constrained person is really like." The subjects were reminded that the essays may or may not describe the subjects accurately and were written because the experimenters asked the subjects to do so, as each subject knew from his or her own experience.
      
      In sum, this independent variable contrasted the standard instructions with one highlighting the situational constraints on the essayists to see if the research outcome is dependent on something the standard instructions are implicitly conveying.
      
      
    • After reading an essay, subjects rated the essay writer's personality on scales related to introversion-extraversion. More precisely, subjects were asked to guess how the essay writer originally rated himself or herself on the introversion-extraversion scale in the very first part of the study. This rating was given on a 10-point scale where 10 = extreme introvert. This number represents the dependent variable.
      
      
• Results:
  
  
  • Extraversion Essay Conditions:
    
    
    • Standard Instruction: Attributed introversion = 4.08
    • Constraint Instruction: Attributed introversion = 4.08
      
      
  • Introversion Essay Conditions:
    
    
    • Standard Instruction: Attributed introversion = 5.96
    • Constraint Instruction: Attributed introversion = 5.57
      
      
• Discussion:
  
  
  • What do these findings suggest about the role of the standard instructions in the basic attitude attribution paradigm?
    
    
  • What does the study suggest about the attribution of personality traits?