Outcome Dependency and Attention to Inconsistent Information

Two studies investigated when people attend to information that is inconsistent with their expectations about another person. It was hypothesized that people sometimes ignore information inconsistent with their expectations, but that outcome dependency would increase people's attention to inconsistent information. When the perceiver's outcomes depend on the other person, the perceiver may be more motivated to have a sense of prediction and control, rather than only motivated to maintain the expectation. Attention to inconsistent information potentially increases the perceiver's sense of prediction and control, so it should increase under outcome dependency. Attention to consistent information should be relatively unaffected by outcome dependency. These hypotheses were supported in two studies: In both, outcome dependency increased attention to inconsistent information, but did not influence attention to consistent information. In the second study, think-aloud protocols revealed that outcome-dependent subjects made more dispositional comments while attending to inconsistent information, and generated both facilitative and inhibitory dispositional attributions for the inconsistent information. This suggests that whether they integrated the inconsistency or not, they responded with more thought about the other person's stable characteristics. The results bear on previous work showing situational attributions for inconsistency and previous models of meaning change in impression formation.