Conditional hedges and the intuitive psychology of traits

The view that the intuitive psychologist exaggerates the consistency of personality implies that dispositional constructs are condition-free summary statements about generalized behavioral tendencies. This article considers the alternative view that dispositional constructs summarize specific condition-behavior contingencies. Despite their condition-free appearance, the dispositional constructs used by child and adult observers in their personality descriptions were hedged by modifiers that reflected knowledge of the variability of behavior. Children's descriptions of their aggressive and withdrawn peers included probabilistic hedges that indicated uncertainty about the occurrence of behaviors (person sometimes does x). Adults made dispositional attributions with greater certainty, but more often modified them with conditional statements which identified when dispositionally relevant behaviors might be observed (person does x when y). Content analyses of these conditional statements revealed that adults systematically linked specific categories of conditions (e.g., aversive interpersonal events) to specific categories of social behavior (e.g., aggressive acts). The results help to clarify how people may hedge dispositional terms in ways that reflect their sensitivity to covariation between situations and behaviors.