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.

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The case for motivated reasoning.

Well-being : the foundations of hedonic psychology

In 2 studies, the Inclusion of Other in the Self (IOS) Scale, a single-item, pictorial measure of closeness, demonstrated alternate-form and test-retest reliability; convergent validity with the Relationship Closeness Inventory (Berscheid, Snyder, & Omoto, 1989), the Sternberg (1988) Intimacy Scale, and other measures; discriminant validity; minimal social desirability correlations; and predictive validity for whether romantic relationships were intact 3 months later

Inclusion of Other in the Self Scale and the structure of interpersonal closeness

The authors present a theory of sexism formulated as ambivalence toward women and validate a corresponding measure, the Ambivalent Sexism Inventory (ASI). The ASI taps 2 positively correlated components of sexism that nevertheless represent opposite evaluative orientations toward women: sexist antipathy or Hostile Sexism (HS) and a subjectively positive ( for sexist men ) orientation toward women, Benevolent Sexism (BS). HS and BS are hypothesized to encompass 3 sources of male ambivalence: Paternalism, Gender Differentiation, and Heterosexuality. Six ASI studies on 2,250 respondents established convergent, discriminant, and predictive validity. Overall ASI scores predict ambivalent attitudes toward women, the HS scale correlates with negative attitudes toward and stereotypes about women, and the BS scale (for nonstudent men only) correlates with positive attitudes toward and stereotypes about women. A copy of the ASI is provided, with scoring instructions, as a tool for further explorations of sexist ambivalence.

The Ambivalent Sexism Inventory: Differentiating hostile and benevolent sexism.

The applicability of 5 conventional guidelines for construct measurement is critically examined: (a) Construct indicators should be internally consistent for valid measures, (b) there are optimal magnitudes of correlations between items, (c) the validity of measures depends on the adequacy with which a specified domain is sampled, (d) within-construct correlations must be greater than between-construct correlations, and (e) linear composites of indicators can replace latent variables. A structural equation perspective is used, showing that without an explicit measurement model relating indicators to latent variables and measurement errors, none of these conventional beliefs hold without qualifications. Moreover, a "causal" indicator model is presented that sometimes better corresponds to the relation of indicators to a construct than does the classical test theory "effect" indicator model.

Allen M. Omoto

Papers

Volunteerism, religiousness, spirituality, and the health outcomes of older adults

41. Social action

Influences of psychological sense of community on voluntary helping and prosocial action: Group Processes, Intergroup Relations, and Helping

The Role of Persuasion Strategies in Motivating Individual and Collective Action

Everyday Helping and Responses to Crises