Psychological-Mindedness, Psychological-Construing, and the Judgment of Deception

This study examined the relationships among several measures of psychological thinking which, in a figurative sense, required "reading between the lines of behavior." Primary measures included psychological-construing (describing another person in psychological terms), the ability to "see through" and explain defense mechanisms, and detecting a bogus thief by means of "suspects" responses to a word association test. Secondary measures were personality-trait measures of psychological-mindedness. Contrary to prediction, the primary measures failed to relate meaningfully to each other. Nor did they correlate with the secondary measures. However, the latter tests were significantly intercorrelated, at least in part because of a common relationship with the tendency to self-ascribe favorable qualities. As a group, the Ss were fairly successful judges at the thief detection task, with nearly 60% performing at a level significantly better than chance. Finally, women surpassed men at the psychological-construing and defense-understanding tasks. It was concluded that psychological-mindedness is not a unitary characteristic of persons.