Abstract
People have naive theories about the relationship between motives and behaviors. Based on recent developments in attribution theories and negativity bias in social perception, we hypothesized that people would associate negative behaviors only with negative motives, while they would associate positive behaviors with not just positive, but also negative motives. These hypotheses were tested in three studies. In Studies 1 and 2, we found that behavioral information inconsistent with naive theories was best recalled under conditions with no cognitive load. However, this recall advantage dissipated when participants were under time pressure during the encoding of the behavioral information. In Study 3, participants were presented with positive and negative behaviors, and were asked to infer the actors' motives from these behaviors. The results showed that naive theories guided their inferences: negative motives were likely to be inferred from negative behaviors, whereas both negative and positive motives were inferred from positive behaviors. Implications for attribution theories and negativity bias in social perception are discussed.
