Burkett, B. N., & Kirkpatrick, L. A. (2002, June). Cheater
Detection and the Fundamental Attribution Error: A Test of Social Exchange
Theory. Poster to be presented at the annual meeting of the Human
Behavior and Evolution Society, New Brunswick, NJ.
Abstract
Research on social exchange theory (Cosmides, 1989; Cosmides & Tooby,
1992) suggests that the human mind has specialized mechanisms that operate
in social exchange relationships to detect violations of cheating on social
contracts. In accordance with the evolutionary theory of reciprocal altruism,
social exchange theory posits that individuals should be able to recognize
cheaters and not just instances of cheating. However, much of the research
examining social exchange theory has used the Wason card selection task
(Wason, 1966), which limits the focus to detecting instances of cheating.
We devised two studies using methodology from the fundamental attribution
error literature in social psychology (FAE; Ross, 1977) to examine whether
individuals detect cheaters and not just instances of cheating. Most of
the FAE literature however, has examined how people make inferences about
dispositions and traits in general, without regard to possible differences
between kinds of dispositions in eliciting the FAE. We suggest that dispositions
associated with dishonesty will more readily activate the FAE than other
traits. This hypothesis was tested in two experiments using two different
methodologies adapted from previous FAE research. Study 1 uses self-reports
regarding trait attributions about the self and another person and Study
2 uses a memory task to examine the role of dispositional inferences in
memory encoding. Data are currently being collected.
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