Motivated sensitivity to preference-inconsistent information.

Peter H. Ditto · James A. Scepansky · Geoffrey D. Munro · Anne Marie Apanovitch · Lisa K. Lockhart

417 citations0/0 files storedJournal of Personality and Social Psychology

No readable copy stored yet — this record is metadata only.

No open-access location is known for this record yet.

Literature note Cite in a project Citation map

Decision-Making and Behavioral Economics Social and Intergroup Psychology Psychology of Social Influence

Abstract

If preference-inconsistent information initiates more effortful cognitive analysis than does preference-consistent information, then people should be more sensitive processors of information they do not want to believe than of information they do want to believe. Three studies supported this prediction. Study 1 found that inferences drawn from favorable interpersonal feedback revealed a correspondence bias, whereas inferences drawn from unfavorable feedback were sensitive to situational constraint. Study 2 showed this sensitivity to the quality of unfavorable feedback to disappear under cognitive load. Study 3 showed that evaluations of the accuracy of favorable medical diagnoses were insensitive to the probability of alternative explanation, whereas evaluations of unfavorable diagnoses were sensitive to probability information. The importance of adaptive considerations in theories of motivated reasoning is discussed.

Paper brief

Loading…

Cite this work

Citation unavailable for this work.

BibTeX RIS CSL-JSON

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Citations in this library

Citation map →

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 417 citations exist upstream.

References

1975Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases 1990The case for motivated reasoning.1988SCRIPTS, PLANS, GOALS, AND UNDERSTANDING 1983Human Inference: Strategies and Shortcomings of Social Judgment.1989Feelings as information: informational and motivational functions of affective states 1991How mental systems believe.1992Motivated skepticism: Use of differential decision criteria for preferred and nonpreferred conclusions.1986Recent Research on Selective Exposure to Information

Cited by

2006Motivated Skepticism in the Evaluation of Political Beliefs 2006The Psychology of Self‐defense: Self‐Affirmation Theory 2000Attitude Change: Persuasion and Social Influence 2002Hot Cognition or Cool Consideration? Testing the Effects of Motivated Reasoning on Political Decision Making 2011The evolution and psychology of self-deception 2001Confirmation bias in sequential information search after preliminary decisions: An expansion of dissonance theoretical research on selective exposure to information.

Explore the map →

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.

Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.