Motivated Thinking

Strategy-Motivated Thinking

Motivations for particular judgment strategies can arise from many different concerns, but those most thoroughly examined relate to concerns with attaining growth (promotion) or maintaining security (prevention). Promotion motivations produce gainoriented strategies focused on achieving advancement, whereas prevention motivations produce loss-oriented strategies focused on maintaining a satisfactory state. Promotion motivations thus elicit inclusive modes of cognitive processing to identify opportunities for gain, whereas prevention motivations elicit exclusive modes of cognitive processing to minimize losses. For example, when promotion-focused, people consider a broader variety of explanations during causal reasoning, engage in more creative and divergent thinking during problem solving, and attend more to abstract and global properties of a stimulus. In contrast, when prevention-focused, people consider a narrower selection of causal explanations, engage in more analytical and convergent thinking, and attend more to concrete and local stimulus properties. Thus, motivated judgment strategies can influence the quality of cognitive processing that occurs across many domains.

Nondirectional Outcome-Motivated Thinking

Beyond motivations to use particular judgment strategies people may also have motivations to reach particular judgment outcomes. Some types of outcome motivations have been labeled nondirectional because they do not involve specific desired conclusions and focus on more general objectives during judgment. The two most-studied nondirectional outcome motivations are desires for accuracy and desires for closure (conciseness, clarity). Because these desires do not concern the specific contents of a judgment, they primarily affect the quantity rather than the quality of cognitive processing that occurs. Whereas desires for accuracy increase how many explanations people consider during causal reasoning, the effort they dedicate to evidence evaluation and information search, and how much information they retrieve from memory, desires for closure have the opposite effect. Accordingly, judgment complexity increases with desires for accuracy and decreases with desires for closure, whereas simple reliance on recently or frequently activated knowledge during judgment increases with desires for closure and decreases with desires for accuracy. However, these processing differences do not always result in more valid conclusions when motivated by accuracy. [Page 529]Because of limitations in cognitive resources or access to necessary information, biases can remain even when accuracy motivation is active. Thus, desires for accuracy or closure affect the quantity of cognitive processing during judgment more than they affect how good a judgment is made.

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