Abstract
Motivation and cognitive capacity are central variables in major models of social judgment and persuasion. However, the exact nature of their interplay in judgment processes has remained ambiguous. The present paper reports on two experimental studies tackling this issue. In Study 1 we demonstrated a cross-over pattern of means for the interaction effect of motivation and cognitive capacity on judgment, with high motivation being beneficial under high cognitive capacity but detrimental under low cognitive capacity. This effect was explained by the participants’ subjective perception of information relevance. In Study 2, the role of information relevance was further investigated, showing that for highly motivated participants, judgment was differently affected by information with low versus high relevance when cognitive capacity was high but not when it was low. In the discussion, we elaborate on these effects, advocating a more dynamic perspective on (social) judgment, acknowledging the conditional (opposite) effects of motivation, in function of cognitive capacity.
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Notes
In contrast, directional motivation refers to particular instances in which the individual prefers a particular judgment and assigns differential weight to information according to this preference. This specific type of motivation is not the focus of the present study.
In this regard, Sigall and Mills (1998) argued that even a nonsignificant result for a manipulation check does not necessarily invalidate significant effects of the manipulation on the dependent variables.
Note that ANOVA with repeated measures of judgment at T1 and T2 yields results that are identical to ANOVA using the change measure. We used the latter procedure to facilitate communication of the results.
For levels of motivation and cognitive capacity being high–high, high–low, low–high and low–low: M = 10.68, SD = 5.28; M = 15.47, SD = 3.99; M = 10.33, SD = 4.41; M = 13.00, SD = 5.16, respectively.
Analyses including the outlier data yielded similar results; F(1, 70) = 11.25, p = .001, F(1, 70) = 1.61, p = .21, and F(1, 70) = 0.91, p = .34, for the main effect of capacity, motivation, and their interaction respectively.
Because in Study 1, the number of consulted pieces of information did not mediate the effects of the independent variables, this variable was no longer of central interest in Study 2. However to ensure comparability in the procedure, also in Study 2, information was presented upon the participants request, with a maximum of 10 pieces.
In the Pelham and Neter (1995) studies, a clear (but incorrect) heuristic rule was available to complete the task. In the present tasks, it is hard to identify such a heuristic rule or heuristic information that could be straightforwardly used to reach judgment. For example, all pieces of information were of equal length and stemmed from the same undisclosed source in Study 2, whereas in Study 1, participants received information from various sources but their message all pointed into the same direction.
This perspective is also reminiscent of the Yerkes-Dodson law (Yerkes and Dodson 1908), stating that too high levels of arousal can degrade performance. Moreover, the impact of motivation has been described to follow the same inverted U-curve and various studies have relied on the Yerkes-Dodson law to explain counterproductive effects of accountability (as used in Study 1) or incentives (as used in Study 2) on performance (see, e.g., Ashton 1990; Mobbs et al. 2009).
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Acknowledgments
The authors would like to thank Martin F. Kaplan for providing access to the materials from Kaplan and Miller (1978). This research was supported by a post-doctoral research grant from the National Fund for Scientific Research-Flanders (Belgium) awarded to the first author.
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Roets, A., Van Hiel, A. & Kruglanski, A.W. When motivation backfires: Optimal levels of motivation as a function of cognitive capacity in information relevance perception and social judgment. Motiv Emot 37, 261–273 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11031-012-9299-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11031-012-9299-0