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Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Vol. 29, No. 9, 1120-1132 (2003)
DOI: 10.1177/0146167203254536

Spontaneous Skepticism: The Interplay of Motivation and Expectation in Responses to Favorable and Unfavorable Medical Diagnoses

Peter H. Ditto

University of California, Irvine, phditto{at}uci.edu

Geoffrey D. Munro

Towson University

Anne Marie Apanovitch

Yale University

James A. Scepansky

Longwood University

Lisa K. Lockhart

Texas A & M University, Kingsville

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 sup-plied 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.

Key Words: motivated reasoning • social cognition • illness perception • spontaneous attribution • expectancy processes


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