272 Social Cognition
kinds of motivational explanations? Hamilton and Gifford
(1976) produced an influential affirmative answer to this
question. In a paper that stimulated dozens of subsequent in-
vestigations, they argued that a simple cognitive principle
could account for the tendency to believe that minority
groups are more likely to possess negative characteristics.
Specifically, they proposed that one could view stereotyping
merely as a natural by-product of our tendency to pay more
attention to distinctive events.
In their experiments, they presented participants with in-
formation about members of two groups of differing sizes.
Although the information was predominantly positive,
negative information was provided about both groups. An im-
portant feature was that within each group, the ratio of nega-
tive to positive information was exactly the same; thus, there
was objectively no correlation between group membership
and positivity of the available information. Hamilton and
Gifford argued that if people have a tendency to attend more
to distinctive information, they will (a) tend to pay more at-
tention to information about the smaller (minority) group, be-
cause it is more rare and hence distinctive; and (b) tend to pay
more attention to negative information than to positive infor-
mation, because it is also relatively rarer. This means that the
negative information about the minority group will be espe-
cially (doubly) distinctive, and it should tend to stand out
more in perceivers’ memories and impressions of the groups.
This pattern was in fact empirically observed. The partici-
pants tended to formillusory correlations,in which the
minority group was perceived to be characterized by negative
qualities greater than those of the majority group.
Although it has been debated whether distinctiveness per
se is the factor that produces this pattern of illusory correla-
tion (e.g., Fiedler, 1991), the interesting point is that in this
situation, negative stereotypes arise in the absence of the
usual motivational forces that had previously been assumed
to be causally responsible for prejudice-related phenomena.
It thus appears that sometimes the basic properties of our in-
formation-processing apparatus can produce biases and
distortions that have important consequences; this can occur
independent of the perceivers’ particular motivational orien-
tation. Yet anyone who has observed the phenomena of
stereotyping and prejudice would instantly recognize that this
account is at best only part of the story. The unsavory signa-
ture of motivated distortion is written in a variety of stereo-
typing phenomena (e.g., Fein & Spencer, 1997; Sinclair &
Kunda, 2000). More generally, purely cognitive explanations
for virtually any socially interesting phenomenon are likely
to fall well short of providing a satisfying explanatory ac-
count. It seems to us undeniable that the study of cognitive
processes must ultimately be situated within the context of
the mind’s affective and motivational dynamics, because
there is no compelling way in which these various facets of
mind can be meaningfully divorced from one another. In the
present section, we attempt to provide a representative survey
of the extensive evidence indicating that motivational and af-
fective forces are indeed of central importance in understand-
ing the dynamics of social cognition. In fact, it becomes
impossible to think of motivation and cognition as separable
phenomena after one develops an appreciation for the impli-
cations of this evidence.
As a starting point for understanding the motivational un-
derpinnings of social cognition, it is useful to consider the
general categories of motives that have come under theoreti-
cal and empirical scrutiny in social cognition research. We
focus here on three such broad categories: epistemic motives
(pertaining to the need to understand the social world), de-
fensive motives (pertaining to the need to view oneself and
one’s environment in pleasing and desirable rather than
threatening ways), and social-adjustive motives (pertaining
to the need for the acceptance and approval of others).Epistemic MotivationA fundamental motivation thought to underlie all of social
cognition to various degrees is the desire to understand the
people and events we experience in our daily lives. This mo-
tivation undoubtedly arises from our basic desire to feel safe
and in control of our lives. When we have a sense of under-
standing the social world, interactions seem predictable and
manageable. When we do not understand what is happening
around us, we quite naturally feel disoriented and relatively
helpless. This core need to figure things out must be balanced
against a variety of constraints, most notably the constraints
imposed by the information-processing limitations of our
nervous systems (e.g., the finite capacity of working mem-
ory). Given that we cannot engage in active processing of all
potentially relevant evidence before forming an impression
or making a judgment, our efforts to understand the world
must necessarily be selective and rely to a certain extent on
inference and supposition. Of primary importance is the sub-
jective sense that we have a reasonably clear understanding
of the situations we face in everyday life.
An assumption shared by many social-cognitive theories
is the idea that epistemic motivation varies across persons
and situations, and this variability has important implications
for the types of information-processing strategies that per-
ceivers are likely to use in making judgments and choices
(see Chaiken & Trope, 1999, for numerous relevant reviews).
Stated simply, the assumption is that when such motivation
is high, perceivers are likely to engage in more sustained,