Towards the resolution of the apparent discrepancy between the incongruency effect and expectancy: Based illusory correlations

Abstract

Two of the most reliable effects of Social Cognition, the incongruency effect and the expectancy-based illusory correlation are apparently incompatible. The incompatibility seems even more acute, if the similarity of the conditions where these effects have, typically, been obtained is taken into account. There were however but a few conceptual attempts at the resolution of this apparent paradox. To make things worst, even these attempts have neither produced a desirable unifying framework or been able to completely account for the null pattern ok known results.  The author presents a new framework, the Generalized Hastie-Srull (GHS) Model which constitutes an effort to overcome this unfortunate state of affairs. Also a new experimental paradigms is also presented, together with the results of the first studies that have used it. These results, showing a dissociation between free recall and the estimation of the frequency of expectancy-incongruent information, provide strong reasons to dismiss the paradox. The broad implications of this work to our understanding of impression formation processes are also addressed.