Choice
Another factor in inferring a disposition from an action is whether the behaviour of the actor is constrained by situational forces or whether it occurs from the actor's choice. If you were assigned to argue a position in a classroom debate (e.g. for or against Neoliberalism), it would be unwise of your audience to infer that your statements in the debate reflect your true beliefs - because you did not choose to argue that particular side of the issue. If, however, you had chosen to argue one side of the issue, then it would be appropriate for the audience to conclude that your statements reflect your true beliefs.
Although choice ought to have an important effect on whether or not people make correspondent inferences, research shows that people do not take choice sufficiently into account when judging another person's attributes or attitudes. There is a tendency for perceivers to assume that when an actor engages in an activity, such as stating a point of view or attitude, the statements made are indicative of the actor's true beliefs, even when there may be clear situational forces affecting the behaviour. In fact, earlier, psychologists had foreseen that something like this would occur; they thought that the actor-act relation was so strong - like a perceptual Gestalt - that people would tend to over-attribute actions to the actor even when there are powerful external forces on the actor that could account for the behaviour.
Read more about this topic: Correspondent Inference Theory
Famous quotes containing the word choice:
“Utah is the only State that gives condemned men a choice between death by hanging or before a firing squad. Most prisoners prefer the firing squad, but one obstinate convict in 1912 elected to be hanged because hanging is more expensive to the state.”
—State of Utah, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)
“Blunders are an inescapable feature of war, because choice in military affairs lies generally between the bad and the worse.”
—Allan Massie (b. 1938)
“But real action is in silent moments. The epochs of our life are not in the visible facts of our choice of a calling, our marriage, our acquisition of an office, and the like, but in a silent thought by the way-side as we walk; in a thought which revises our entire manner of life, and says,Thus hast thou done, but it were better thus.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (18031882)