Motivational determinants of systematic processing: expectancy moderates effects of desired confidence on processing effort

✍ Scribed by Gerd Bohner; Susanne Rank; Marc-André Reinhard; Sabine Einwiller; Hans-Peter Erb

• Book ID: 101275860
• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 1998
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 233 KB
• Volume: 28
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0046-2772
• DOI: 10.1002/(sici)1099-0992(199803/04)28:2<185::aid-ejsp864>3.0.co;2-o

✦ Synopsis

Extending the motivational assumptions of the heuristic-systematic model (Chaiken, Liberman, & Eagly, 1989), the authors hypothesized that a discrepancy between desired and actual judgmental con®dence raises processing eort only if the expectancy that processing will increase con®dence is high. In Experiment 1, university students expected to review information for upcoming social judgments. Desired con®dence was varied through low versus high task importance. To manipulate expectancy, low versus high perceived processing ecacy was induced via feedback. As predicted, high-(as compared to low-) importance participants expressed greater interest in receiving information and selected more information when perceived ecacy was high, and this eect was mediated via a heightened discrepancy between desired and actual con®dence. These eects were not obtained under low perceived ecacy. In Experiment 2, students processed a persuasive message. Only high importance conditions were studied; processing ecacy and argument strength were manipulated. As predicted, high-(but not low-) ecacy participants processed the message systematically, as indicated by a dierent impact of argument strength and by mediational path analyses. It is argued that the precision of social judgment models would bene®t from an explicit consideration of processing-and outcome-related expectancy variables.