ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an integrative review of the vast literature concerned with, or relating to, social inference. It argues that the whole area of social inference is being studied in piecemeal fashion, owing to the lack of any generally accepted integrative framework. The chapter explores the need for social inference researchers to consider more thoroughly the phenomenological processes involved in social inference making. It discusses a configuralist, or Gestalt, view of the effects of multiple pieces of stimulus information. The chapter presents a framework for examining configurations of cues, based upon subject–verb–object theory. This framework provides a mechanism for systematically studying, and ultimately predicting, the effects of stimulus cues in combination. It also calls attention to the possibility that different people will tend to focus on different cues in different situations, a complexity that must ultimately be dealt with by inference theorists.
