Goals and needs shape individuals’ thinking, a phenomenon known as motivated cognition. We highlight research from social psychology and cognitive neuroscience that provides insight into the ...structure of motivated cognition. In addition to demonstrating its ubiquity, we suggest that motivated cognition is often effortless and pervades information processing.
The United States is increasingly politically polarized, fueling intergroup conflict and intensifying partisan biases in cognition and behavior. To date, research on intergroup bias has separately ...examined biases in how people search for information and how they interpret information. Here, we integrate these two perspectives to elucidate how partisan biases manifest across the information processing stream, beginning with (a) a biased selection of information, leading to (b) skewed samples of information that interact with (c) motivated interpretations to produce evaluative biases. Across three experiments and four internal meta-analyses, participants (N = 2,431) freely sampled information about ingroup and outgroup members or ingroup and outgroup political candidates until they felt confident to evaluate them. Across experiments, we reliably find that most participants begin sampling information from the ingroup, which was associated with individual differences in group-based motives, and that participants sampled overall more information from the ingroup. This sampling behavior, in turn, generates more variability in ingroup (relative to outgroup) experiences. We find that more variability in ingroup experiences predicted when participants decided to stop sampling and was associated with more biased evaluations. We further demonstrate that participants employ different sampling strategies over time when the ingroup is de facto worse-obfuscating Real Group Differences-and that participants selectively integrate their experiences into evaluations based on congeniality. The proposed framework extends classic findings in psychology by demonstrating how biases in sampling behavior interact with motivated interpretations to produce downstream evaluative biases and has implications for intergroup bias interventions.
The visual perception of individuals has received considerable attention (visual person perception), but little social psychological work has examined the processes underlying the visual perception ...of groups of people (visual people perception). Ensemble-coding is a visual mechanism that automatically extracts summary statistics (e.g., average size) of lower-level sets of stimuli (e.g., geometric figures), and also extends to the visual perception of groups of faces. Here, we consider whether ensemble-coding supports people perception, allowing individuals to form rapid, accurate impressions about groups of people. Across nine studies, we demonstrate that people visually extract high-level properties (e.g., diversity, hierarchy) that are unique to social groups, as opposed to individual persons. Observers rapidly and accurately perceived group diversity and hierarchy, or variance across race, gender, and dominance (Studies 1-3). Further, results persist when observers are given very short display times, backward pattern masks, color- and contrast-controlled stimuli, and absolute versus relative response options (Studies 4a-7b), suggesting robust effects supported specifically by ensemble-coding mechanisms. Together, we show that humans can rapidly and accurately perceive not only individual persons, but also emergent social information unique to groups of people. These people perception findings demonstrate the importance of visual processes for enabling people to perceive social groups and behave effectively in group-based social interactions.
People learn about themselves from social feedback, but desires for coherence and positivity constrain how feedback is incorporated into the self-concept. We developed a network-based model of the ...self-concept and embedded it in a reinforcement-learning framework to provide a computational account of how motivations shape self-learning from feedback. Participants (N = 46 adult university students) received feedback while evaluating themselves on traits drawn from a causal network of trait semantics. Network-defined communities were assigned different likelihoods of positive feedback. Participants learned from positive feedback but dismissed negative feedback, as reflected by asymmetries in computational parameters that represent the incorporation of positive versus negative outcomes. Furthermore, participants were constrained in how they incorporated feedback: Self-evaluations changed less for traits that have more implications and are thus more important to the coherence of the network. We provide a computational explanation of how motives for coherence and positivity jointly constrain learning about the self from feedback, an explanation that makes testable predictions for future clinical research.
Despite unprecedented access to information, partisans increasingly disagree about basic facts that are backed by data, posing a serious threat to a democracy that relies on finding common ground ...based on objective truths. We examine the underpinnings of this phenomenon using drift diffusion modeling (DDM). Partisans (N = 148) completed a sequential sampling task where they evaluated the honesty of Democrat or Republican politicians during a debate based on fact-check scores. We found that partisans required less and weaker evidence to correctly categorize the ingroup as more honest, and were more accurate on trials when the ingroup candidate was more honest, compared to the outgroup. DDM revealed that such tendencies arise from both a prior preference for categorizing the ingroup as more honest (i.e., biased starting point) and more precise accumulation of information favoring the ingroup candidate compared to the outgroup (i.e., biased drift rate). Moreover, individual differences in cognitive reasoning moderated task performance for the most devoted partisans and maintained divergent associations with the DDM parameters. This suggests that partisans may reach biased conclusions via different pathways depending on their depth of cognitive reasoning. These findings provide key insights into the mechanisms driving partisan divides in polarized environments, and can inform interventions that reduce impasse and conflict.
Although prefrontal cortex has been implicated in the cognitive regulation of emotion, the cortical-subcortical interactions that mediate this ability remain poorly understood. To address this issue, ...we identified a right ventrolateral prefrontal region (vlPFC) whose activity correlated with reduced negative emotional experience during cognitive reappraisal of aversive images. We then applied a pathway-mapping analysis on subcortical regions to locate mediators of the association between vlPFC activity and reappraisal success (i.e., reductions in reported emotion). Results identified two separable pathways that together explained ∼50% of the reported variance in self-reported emotion: (1) a path through nucleus accumbens that predicted
greater reappraisal success, and (2) a path through ventral amygdala that predicted
reduced reappraisal success (i.e., more negative emotion). These results provide direct evidence that vlPFC is involved in both the generation and regulation of emotion through different subcortical pathways, suggesting a general role for this region in appraisal processes.
A hallmark of intergroup biases is the tendency to individuate members of one’s own group but process members of other groups categorically. While the consequences of these biases for stereotyping ...and discrimination are well-documented, their early perceptual underpinnings remain less understood. Here, we investigated the neural mechanisms of this effect by testing whether high-level visual cortex is differentially tuned in its sensitivity to variation in own-race versus other-race faces. Using a functional MRI adaptation paradigm, we measured White participants’ habituation to blocks of White and Black faces that parametrically varied in their groupwise similarity. Participants showed a greater tendency to individuate own-race faces in perception, showing both greater release from adaptation to unique identities and increased sensitivity in the adaptation response to physical difference among faces. These group differences emerge in the tuning of early face-selective cortex and mirror behavioral differences in the memory and perception of own- versus other-race faces. Our results suggest that biases for other-race faces emerge at some of the earliest stages of sensory perception.
Power is accompanied by a sense of entitlement, which shapes reactions to self-relevant injustices. We propose that powerful people more strongly expect to be treated fairly and are faster to ...perceive unjust treatment that violates these expectations. After preliminary data demonstrated that power leads people to expect fair outcomes for themselves, we conducted four experiments. Participants primed with high (vs. low) power were faster to identify violations of distributive justice in which they were victims (Study 1). This effect was specific to self-relevant injustices (Study 2) and generalized to violations of interpersonal justice (Study 3). Finally, participants primed with high power were more likely to take action against unfair treatment (Study 4). These findings suggest a process by which hierarchies may be maintained: Whereas the powerless are comparatively less sensitive to unfair treatment, the powerful may retain their social standing by quickly perceiving and responding to self-relevant injustices.
Humans are social creatures, engaging almost constantly in social behaviors that serve ultimate social goals, such as forming strong bonds with one another. However, most social behaviors provide ...only incremental progress toward an ultimate goal. Instead, the drive to engage in any individual social act may derive from its proximal value rather than its ultimate goal. Thus, this proximal value forms the foundation on which the complexities of human sociality are built. We describe two complementary approaches for using proximal social rewards to understand social behaviors and their ultimate goals: (a) decontextualizing social rewards—paring down complex social interactions can help identify which basic building blocks remain valuable even in minimalistic contexts—and (b) recontextualizing social rewards—reintroducing motivational and contextual factors into the study of social experience can help identify how proximal rewards serve their ultimate function. We discuss how this dual-approach framework can inform future research by bridging basic social building blocks and real-world social goals.
People experience instances of social feedback as interdependent with potential implications for their entire self-concept. How do people maintain positivity and coherence across the self-concept ...while updating self-views from feedback? We present a network model describing how the brain represents the semantic dependency relations among traits and uses this information to avoid an overall loss of positivity and coherence. Both male and female human participants received social feedback during a self-evaluation task while undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging. We modeled self-belief updating by incorporating a reinforcement learning model within the network structure. Participants learned more rapidly from positive than negative feedback and were less likely to change self-views for traits with more dependencies in the network. Further, participants back propagated feedback across network relations while retrieving prior feedback on the basis of network similarity to inform ongoing self-views. Activation in ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) reflected the constrained updating process such that positive feedback led to higher activation and negative feedback to less activation for traits with more dependencies. Additionally, vmPFC was associated with the novelty of a trait relative to previously self-evaluated traits in the network, and angular gyrus was associated with greater certainty for self-beliefs given the relevance of prior feedback. We propose that neural computations that selectively enhance or attenuate social feedback and retrieve past relevant experiences to guide ongoing self-evaluations may support an overall positive and coherent self-concept.
We humans experience social feedback throughout our lives, but we do not dispassionately incorporate feedback into our self-concept. The implications of feedback for our entire self-concept plays a role in how we either change or retain our prior self-beliefs. In a neuroimaging study, we find that people are less likely to change their beliefs from feedback when the feedback has broader implications for the self-concept. This resistance to change is reflected in processing in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, a region that is central to self-referential and social cognition. These results are broadly applicable given the role that maintaining a positive and coherent self-concept plays in promoting mental health and development throughout the lifespan.
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