What do you want? How perceivers use cues to make goal inferences about others

Variables influencing inferences about a stranger’s goal during an unsolicited social interaction were explored. Experiment 1 developed a procedure for identifying cues. Experiments 2 and 3 assessed the relative importance of various cues (space, time, characteristics of oneself, characteristics of the stranger, and the stranger’s behavior) for goal judgments. Results indicated that situational context cues informed goal judgments in ways that were consistent with diagnosticity ratings and typicality ratings of those cues. Stranger characteristics and stranger behaviors affected goal judgments more than would be expected from these quantitative measures of their informativeness. Nonetheless, the results are consistent with a mental model view that assumes perceivers monitor situational cues present during interactions and that goal inferences are guided by the informativeness of these cues.