It is proposed that motivation may affect reasoning through reliance on a biased set of cognitive processes—that is, strategies for accessing, constructing, and evaluating beliefs. The motivation to be accurate enhances use of those beliefs and strategies that are considered most appropriate, whereas the motivation to arrive at particular conclusions enhances use of those that are considered most likely to yield the desired conclusion. There is considerable evidence that people are more likely to arrive at conclusions that they want to arrive at, but their ability to do so is constrained by their ability to construct seemingly reasonable justifications for these conclusions. These ideas can account for a wide variety of research concerned with motivated reasoning. The notion that goals or motives affect reasoning has a long and controversial history in social psychology. The propositions that motives may affect perceptions (Erdelyi, 1974), attitudes (Festinger, 1957), and attributions (Heider, 1958) have been put forth by some psychologists and challenged by others. Although early researchers and theorists took it for granted that motivation may cause people to make self-serving attributions and permit them to believe what they want to believe because they want to believe it, this view, and the research used to uphold it, came under concentrated criticism in the 1970s. The major and most damaging criticism of the motivational view was that all research purported to demonstrate motivated reasoning could be reinterpreted in entirely cognitive, nonmotivational terms (Miller & Ross, 1975; Nisbett & Ross, 1980). Thus people could draw self-serving conclusions not because they wanted to but because these conclusions seemed more plausible, given their prior beliefs and expectancies. Because both cognitive and motivational accounts could be generated for any empirical study, some theorists argued that the hot versus cold cognition controversy could not be solved, at least in the attribution paradigm (Ross & Fletcher, 1985; Tetlock & Levi, 1982). One reason for the persistence of this controversy lies in the failure of researchers to explore the mechanisms underlying motivated reasoning. Recently, several authors have attempted to rectify this neglect (Kruglanski & Freund, 1983; Kunda, 1987; Pyszczynski & Greenberg, 1987; Sorrentino & Higgins, 1986). All these authors share a view of motivation as having its effects through cognitive processes: People rely on cognitive processes and representations to arrive at their desired conclusions, but motivation plays a role in determining which of these will be used on a given occasion.

/pdf/the-case-for-motivated-reasoning-2ki9tjbrr6.pdf

The case for motivated reasoning.

Publisher Summary Individuals come to “know” their own attitudes, emotions, and other internal states partially by inferring them from observations of their own overt behavior and/ or the circumstances in which this behavior occurs. Thus, to the extent that internal cues are weak, ambiguous, or uninterpretable, the individual is functionally in the same position as an outside observer, an observer who must necessarily rely upon those same external cues to infer the individual's inner states. This chapter traces the conceptual antecedents and empirical consequences of these propositions, attempts to place the theory in a slightly enlarged frame of reference, and clarifies just what phenomena the theory can and cannot account for in the rapidly growing experimental literature of self-attribution phenomena. Several experiments and paradigms from the cognitive dissonance literature are amenable to self-perception interpretations. But precisely because such experiments are subject to alternative interpretations, they cannot be used as unequivocal evidence for self-perception theory. The reinterpretation of cognitive dissonance phenomena and other self-perception phenomena have been discussed. The chapter highlights some differences between self-perception and interpersonal perception and shift of paradigm in social psychology. It discusses some unsolved problems, such as the conceptual status of noncognitive response classes and the strategy of functional analysis.

Self-perception theory

Choice, active response, self-regulation, and other volition may all draw on a common inner resource. In Experiment 1, people who forced themselves to eat radishes instead of tempting chocolates subsequently quit faster on unsolvable puzzles than people who had not had to exert self-control over eating. In Experiment 2, making a meaningful personal choice to perform attitude-relevant behavior caused a similar decrement in persistence. In Experiment 3, suppressing emotion led to a subsequent drop in performance of solvable anagrams. In Experiment 4, an initial task requiring high self-regulation made people more passive (i.e., more prone to favor the passive-response option). These results suggest that the self's capacity for active volition is limited and that a range of seemingly different, unrelated acts share a common resource.

/pdf/ego-depletion-is-the-active-self-a-limited-resource-54krf29agc.pdf

Ego depletion: is the active self a limited resource?

ions as internal properties of clients rather than as hypothetical constructs of therapists has resulted in considerable confusion about the types of changes effected by different approaches to the modification of behavior. It is widely assumed that behavioral and psychodynamic approaches are concerned with fundamentally different subject matters. The latter methods supposedly treat complexes, repressed impulses, ego strengths and mental apparatuses, the underlying causes of behavior, whereas behavioral approaches are believed to modify only superficial behavior. This apparent difference in subject matter, however, exists primarily in the therapists’ conceptualizations, not in actual practice. Ego strength, to take an example, is a www.freepsychotherapybooks.org 235 hypothetical construct and not an entity within the client. One can neither observe nor modify hypothetical constructs. The person’s behavior— broadly defined to include cognitive, emotional, and motor expressions—is the only class of events that can be altered through psychological procedures, and therefore it is the only meaningful subject matter of psychotherapy. Similarly, stimulus variables are the only events that the therapist can modify to effect behavioral change. Psychotherapy, like any other social influence enterprise, is thus a process in which the therapist arranges stimulus conditions that produce desired behavioral changes in the client. If, for instance, a psychotherapist creates conditions that increase the frequency of the behaviors from which ego strength is inferred, the client will be said to have acquired increased ego strength as a function of treatment. On the other hand, if the frequency of www.freepsychotherapybooks.org 236 ego-strength behaviors has been reduced in the course of psychotherapy, the client has suffered a loss in ego strength. Clearly, ego strength is simply a hypothetical abstraction whose presumed behavioral referents are the only reality the psychotherapist can modify. In the final analysis, social-learning approaches and all other existing forms of treatment modify the same subject matter, namely, behavioral phenomena. Most discussions of change-inducing processes, however, focus on treating the inferences made from behavioral events as though these abstractions existed independently and caused their behavioral referents. Philosophers of science have cautioned against the attribution of causal potency to described properties of behavior. Their warnings have had little impact on personality theorizing. Neither traits nor types, as concepts, have www.freepsychotherapybooks.org 237 any real existence. They are merely words, and words do not exist in the eye of the observer nor in the people observed. A man can not be said to have either a type or a trait, but he can be said to fit either a type or a trait. At present the fit will be inexact, for dimensions of personality have not yet been quantified well enough to permit of accurate measurement. In the case of height, the measurement can be precise, and little confusion results from saying that a man has a certain height. Observation and concept are so closely related that the phrase is not ordinarily understood to mean more than it says, namely, that the extent of a given datum of observation in one direction fits a certain section of an ideal dimension of distance. But if an attempt is made to fit some mode of human conduct to the trait of courage, the looseness of correspondence between behavior and concepts leads to mischievous reification. The concept parts company with behavior, picks up undefined notions in its flight from reality, and finally acquires an independent real existence in its own right, so that when it is said that a man has courage, he will be thought of as the fortunate owner of something considerably www.freepsychotherapybooks.org 238 more significant than a certain pattern of behavior [Pratt, 1939, p. 115]. Similarly, a person who is plagued with “weak ego strength” will be viewed as suffering from something vastly more significant than the behavioral referents from which the construct is inferred. For purposes of further illustration, let us designate behaviors in which persons violate social and legal codes of behavior and frequently engage in assaultive activities as the external expressions of an inferred zoognick. Based on prevailing clinical practices, the zoognick would come to represent an intrapsychically functioning agent. An honorific causative power would be conferred upon this hypothetical zoognick, whereas the observed behavior from which its existence is inferred would be depreciated as superficial behavioral manifestations. Before long, www.freepsychotherapybooks.org 239 psychological tests would be constructed to measure zoognick strength on the basis of which diagnosticians would tautologically attribute clients’ behavior to the action of the underlying zoognick. Proceeding on the assumption that “patient variables are not conceived to be behaviors, but constructs concerning internal constellations” (Wallerstein, 1963), psychotherapeutic goals would be stated in terms of removing the pernicious zoognick. On the other hand, direct modification of the deviant behavior would be considered not only superficial but potentially dangerous, since elimination of the symptomatic expressions might force the zoognick to emerge in equally pernicious substitute forms. A sufficiently charismatic exponent of zoognick theory could undoubtedly develop a sizable following with the same extraordinary conviction in the vital importance and causative potency of www.freepsychotherapybooks.org 240 zoognicks as that shown by adherents of libidinal forces. Oedipal complexes, collective unconsciouses, and self-dynamisms. Finally, humanists would embrace zoognick theory as more befitting the complexities of human beings than those simplistic mechanistic doctrines that stubbornly insist that the zoognick is the deviant behavior rechristened. Most treatment approaches devote remarkably little attention to the selection of objectives; when they are specified (Mahrer, 1967), the intended outcomes generally include a variety of abstract virtues described in socially desirable terms, such as reorganization of the self, restoration of functional effectiveness, development of individuation and self-actualization, establishment of homeostatic equilibrium, where there is id there shall ego be and where superego was there shall conscious ego be, achievement of identity, www.freepsychotherapybooks.org 241 acceptance of self-consciousness, enhancement of ego strength, or the attainment of self-awareness, emotional maturity, and positive mental health. While some of these objectives allude to vaguely defined behavioral characteristics, most refer to nebulous hypothetical states. These abstractions convey little information unless they are further defined in terms of specifically observable behavior. Behavioral Specification of Objectives A meaningfully stated objective has at least two basic characteristics (Mager, 1961). First, it should identify and describe the behaviors considered appropriate to the desired outcomes. The term “behavior” is used in the broad sense to include a complex of observable and potentially measurable activities including motor, cognitive, and physiological classes of responses. www.freepsychotherapybooks.org 242 After the intended goals have been specified in performance, and preferably in measurable terms, decisions can be made about the experiences that are most likely to produce the desired outcomes. For example, the statement, “Increase the person’s self-confidence and self-esteem,” designates a therapeutic intent; but it furnishes little guidance, since it does not reveal the kinds of behaviors the person will exhibit after he has achieved increased self-esteem. Once self-esteem and the behaviors that will be esteem producing for a particular client have been delineated, one can arrange conditions that will create the requisite behaviors and thereby produce the condition of positive selfevaluation. In some instances learning vocational skills may be most relevant to acquiring selfesteem; in some cases developing interpersonal competencies that will secure positive responses from others may be most appropriate; in other www.freepsychotherapybooks.org 243 cases eliminating alienating social behaviors may be required if self-evaluation is to be altered; and finally, in cases where a person is relatively competent socially and vocationally, an increase in self-esteem behavior may require the modification of stringent, self-imposed standards of behavior upon which self-approving and self-deprecatory responses are contingent. Similarly, unless the goals specify the behavior that persons will exhibit when successfully self-actualized, internally integrated, self-accepted, personally reconstructed, homeostatically equilibrated, or emotionally matured, such goals provide little

Principles of behavior modification

Current psychological theory and research affirm the positive affective and motivational consequences of having personal choice. These findings have led to the popular notion that the more choice, the better--that the human ability to manage, and the human desire for, choice is unlimited. Findings from 3 experimental studies starkly challenge this implicit assumption that having more choices is necessarily more intrinsically motivating than having fewer. These experiments, which were conducted in both field and laboratory settings, show that people are more likely to purchase gourmet jams or chocolates or to undertake optional class essay assignments when offered a limited array of 6 choices rather than a more extensive array of 24 or 30 choices. Moreover, participants actually reported greater subsequent satisfaction with their selections and wrote better essays when their original set of options had been limited. Implications for future research are discussed.

https://faculty.washington.edu/jdb/345/345%20Articles/Iyengar%20&%20Lepper%20(2000).pdf

When choice is demotivating: Can one desire too much of a good thing?

In the forced-compliance paradigm, attitude change following a counterattitudinal performance has been shown to be both a direct (reinforcement prediction) and an inverse (dissonance prediction) function of the amount of incentive offered. An experiment successfully demonstrated that if S feels free not to comply attitude change will be inversely related to incentive magnitude, but that the positive relationship will hold if this freedom is reduced. It was hypothesized that the procedure of an earlier study by Rosenberg, whose results supported the reinforcement prediction, inadvertently reduced Ss' freedom not to comply. When this procedure was closely replicated in a 2nd experiment, the positive relationship was again found, but when the procedure was modified to make a decision not to comply a viable alternative for S, the inverse relationship resulted. The 2 experiments together show that a low incentive arouses dissonance, leading to attitude change, only when the person remains free to decide against compliance after he has been fully informed about the incentive. If the incentive is announced after the person Is committed to compliance, a reinforcement effect obtains. If a person can be induced to behave publicly in a manner that does not follow from his private attitudes, he will experience cognitive dissonance. The magnitude of dissonance will be greater when there are few reasons for complying than when there are many reasons (Festinger, 19S7). This dissonance may be reduced by an accommodating change in private attitude if other ways of reducing dissonance are not available. Thus a person who has been induced to behave in a counterattitudinal fashion will change his private attitude more the less he has been rewarded for complying. Festinger and Carlsmith (1959) found support for this proposition in a study in which subjects were persuaded (for $1 or $20) to extol the attractiveness of a dull and tedious task for the benefit of the next subject. Also, Cohen (1962) found that Yale students who were induced to write essays in favor of the New Haven police later showed more positive attitudes the smaller the incentive they had been offered to write the essay. Rosenberg (196S) has recently questioned the generality of this proposed relationship and has suggested that subjects in the

https://www.uni-muenster.de/imperia/md/content/psyifp/aeechterhoff/wintersemester2011-12/seminarthemenfelderdersozialpsychologie/07_linder_cooperjones_decisionfreedom-incentivemagnitude_jpsp1967.pdf

Decision freedom as a determinant of the role of incentive magnitude in attitude change.

Internal states or external stimuli: Observers' attitude judgments and the dissonance-theory-self-persuasion controversy

Effects of expected effort on attitude change prior to exposure

Pre-exposure persuasion as a result of commitment to pre-exposure effort

Reactance theory analysis of predecisional cognitive processes.

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