FIGURE 4.5
On Second Thought
People who are cognitively strained are less likely to correct their dispositional judgments of others. In this study, participants under normal conditions did not perceive an anxious-looking woman as being an anxious person if they knew she was talking about something anxiety provoking. But under cognitive strain, participants did not correctly take into account the topic and simply assumed she was a dispositionally anxious person.

[Data source: Gilbert et al. (1988)]