nominators believed that their knowledge of peers’ reputations and personality permitted them to make confident predictions, at least about some individuals, and that their designated altruists and nonaltruists would manifest their dispositions regardless of the situational factors involved. But they were wrong! The situational variables proved more important than the relevant actors’ dispositions – more important, at least, than any dispositions salient to their peers. The evidence thus highlights serious flaws in some central tenets of lay personality theory. The evidence, in fact, is
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