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Bending perception to desire: Effects of task demands, motivation, and cognitive resources

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Abstract

Determinants of motivated judgments were examined in this research. Three experiments investigated how dominant motivation, biasing difficulty and mental resources combine to produce motivationally congruent judgments. Studies 1 and 2 showed that where a biasing motivation is dominant the presence of resources can augment a motivational bias in judgment. Study 3 replicated that result and showed that resources contribute to the formation of biased judgments only where biasing is difficult to accomplish, but not where it is relatively easy to accomplish. In addition, Study 3 showed that where the accuracy motivation is dominant and biasing is the easy default, unbiased judgments will occur only in the presence (vs. absence) of resources. In contrast, where unbiased judgments are easy to come by, such judgments occur irrespective of resources.

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Notes

  1. Although we hypothesized two different result patterns between accuracy and biasing motivation conditions, the expected patterns were not expected to be necessarily detected by a four-way interaction. This is so because several of the predicted effects were expected to be in the same direction in both the accuracy and the biasing motivation condition, and in the match versus mismatch conditions. Specifically, some directional tendency toward biased judgments (claiming the ownership for positive traits and disowning negative ones) was assumed to be present in both the biasing motivation and the accuracy motivation condition, though it was expected to be more pronounced in the former versus the latter condition. Similarly, the same direction of bias (toward self enhancement) should be expected for the ambiguous and the unambiguous traits, even though the latter should be more amenable to bias [as Dunning et al. (1989) demonstrated]. The only expected differences between conditions were that in the biasing motivation condition the biasing tendency should have been enhanced in the match-unambiguous traits, whereas in the accuracy condition, the biasing tendency should have been enhanced in the mismatch-ambiguous traits. These subtle differences may be readily swamped in the four way interaction by the omnibus tendencies to perceive the positive versus negative traits as more characteristic of self, and by the two way interaction that shows that difference to be more pronounced for ambiguous versus unambiguous traits.

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Acknowledgments

This research was supported in part by a grant from the Social Sciences Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) to the first author and an NSF Grant 0314291/0313483 to the second author.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Département de Psychologie, Université du Québec à Montréal, P.O. Box. 8888, Station “Centre-ville”, Montreal, QC, H3C 3P8, Canada

    Jocelyn J. Bélanger

  2. University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA

    Arie W. Kruglanski & Xiaoyan Chen

  3. University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, USA

    Edward Orehek

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  1. Jocelyn J. Bélanger
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  2. Arie W. Kruglanski
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  3. Xiaoyan Chen
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Correspondence to Jocelyn J. Bélanger.

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Bélanger, J.J., Kruglanski, A.W., Chen, X. et al. Bending perception to desire: Effects of task demands, motivation, and cognitive resources. Motiv Emot 38, 802–814 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11031-014-9436-z

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