2003/09/01 by Peter H. Ditto, Geoffrey D. Munro, Anne Marie Apanovitch +2 · 2 citations
Decision Sciences · Social Sciences · Psychology · #Decision-Making and Behavioral Economics #Social and Intergroup Psychology #Optimism, Hope, and Well-being #Psychology #Test (biology) #Social psychology
paper · doi:10.1177/0146167203254536
openalex publication_date 2003/09/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/06/23
The quantity of processing view of motivated reasoning predicts that individuals are more likely to spontaneously question the validity of unfavorable than favorable feedback even when the objective likelihood of the feedback is equivalent. Participants were videotaped self-administering a bogus medical test revealing either a favorable or an unfavorable result. In Studies 1 and 2, unfavorable result participants required more time to accept the validity of the test result and were more likely to spontaneously recheck its validity than were favorable result participants. However, unfavorable results also were perceived as less expected than were favorable results, even though the information supplied about their objective likelihood was identical. Study 3 showed that participants evaluating another student's results perceived favorable and unfavorable outcomes as equally likely, suggesting that the subjective likelihood of positive and negative feedback is also subject to motivational influence.