Most White Americans believe they are not prejudiced people despite evidence suggesting that most people hold and express racial bias. How is this possible? Drawing on research from motivated cognition, I tested whether people engage in motivated reasoning when facing a threat to their unprejudiced self-image. Students in this study were randomly assigned to a control condition or a threat of prejudice condition. Afterward, they read an article connecting either introversion or extraversion to racial prejudice and explained why that relationship might be true. Finally, they answered how well introversion and extraversion traits describe themselves. Although I hypothesized that students would respond by shifting their self-concept away from the traits they believed are related to prejudice, the data only supported this prediction in the control condition. In the threat of prejudice condition, there was no support for the motivated reasoning explanation. In fact, it appears that students were more likely to acknowledge their racial bias in the threat of prejudice condition. Despite the lack of evidence for motivated reasoning, I discuss the implications of this study for maintaining an unprejudiced self-image. / 1 / Aaron James Moss

One of the biggest challenges for the modern society is that of climate change. Despite the growing accumulation of scientific evidence that points towards a strong need for action to be made regarding anthropogenic (human made) climate change, there is a lack of unity in what actions are needed and an outspread passivity amongst both establishments and the public. The reason behind this is attributed to lack of belief in anthropogenic climate change, and lack of pro-environmental attitudes amongst the public. Furthermore, these issues have been found to relate to identity related beliefs and attitudes that conflict with pro-environmental beliefs and attitudes, where political orientation has proven to be a strong factor. One way of dealing with these issues could be through informational influences. By presenting people to information shaped in different ways, one could increase the belief in anthropogenic climate change and pro-environmental attitudes. This study examined the relationship between three different informational influences, and its potential effect on climate change beliefs and attitudes. Furthermore, this study examined the relationship between demographic factors such as age, gender and political orientation with regards to their potential effect on climate change beliefs and attitudes. 449 participants completed a survey with intent to measure the potential effects informational influences and demographic factors had on climate change beliefs and attitudes. Despite that indications where found, no significant results could be identified for the informational influences. All demographic factors had some significant effect on climate change beliefs or attitudes, where political orientation was the strongest influencing factor. This relates to earlier research and further implications were discussed for future studies.

Remembrance of one's personal past and the development of false memories have recently received intense public scrutiny. Based upon self-schema (Markus, 1977) and self-verification (Swann, 1987) theories, two studies were conducted to investigate the hypothesis that a self-schema guides cognitive processing of self-relevant information and thereby influences the construction of a memory that includes false information, particularly more so if this information is self-schema consistent than inconsistent. Study 2 also investigated the hypothesis that the cognitive processing goal of understanding a negative outcome (motivated cognition) would interact with self-consistent expectations to enhance the likelihood that a false memory would be created. Self-schematic Type A and Type B individuals (only self-schematic Type A individuals participated in Study 2) participated in a team problem solving task (the to-be-remembered event) and returned a week later for a "questionnaire" session during which a narrative was read that contained self-consistent or self-discrepant false information. In both studies, chi-square analyses showed participants given self-consistent false information were more likely to report this information on a recall and a recognition test than were participants given self-discrepant false information. Study 2 included team performance feedback (failure or neutral), which was presented just before participants read the narrative containing the false information. The purpose of this procedure was to assess the moderating effect of motivated cognitive processes on the acceptance of self-consistent false information on memory. A loglinear analysis provided confirmation for the expected interaction. The following pattern was obtained for false recall and false self-description (description of team problem solving behavior using the false information trait adjectives): Consistent/failure > Consistent/neutral > Discrepant/neutral = Discrepant/failure. Unexpectedly, this pattern was not obtained on the recognition test data. These findings expand current understanding of processes that contribute to the production of a false memory and extend the traditional, post event false information paradigm. The results are discussed in the context of the false memory debate and future research directions are noted. / Ph. D.

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