Does Approach Motivation Induce Right-Oriented Bias? Reply to Price and Wolfers (2014)

Abstract

In 2011, we tested the hypothesis that people exhibit a right-oriented bias when they are approach motivated and act quickly (Roskes, Sligte, Shalvi, & De Dreu, 2011). An experiment showed that when people had to act quickly, they bisected lines farther to the right when they were approach motivated than when they were avoid-ance motivated. Analysis of archival data on soccer pen-alty shoot-outs further revealed that goalkeepers dived more to the right when their team was behind than when their team was not behind, a situation we propose induces approach motivation.Price and Wolfers (2014) challenge whether the right-oriented bias manifests itself in goalkeepers’ behavior. They make three critiques of our findings: (a) The effect does not replicate, (b) an alternative coding of “being behind” eliminates the effect, and (c) the goalkeepers’ tendency to dive right is not dysfunctional. Our analysis suggests that the bias exists, although Price and Wolfers’s alternative coding raises interesting questions about the exact settings that evoke approach motivation. We are happy to see that more data are being collected, which is important for enhancing understanding of the phenomenon.Prior research has demonstrated an association between approach motivation and a variety of right-ori-ented biases. This association is explained by increased left-hemispheric brain activation under approach motiva-tion, which enhances attention and action readiness toward the right (Vallortigara & Rogers, 2005). For exam-ple, dogs wag their tails toward the right when they observe their owners (Quaranta, Siniscalchi, & Vallortigara, 2007), and when quickly dividing lines into equal parts, approach-motivated people divide them to the right of their centers (Nash, McGregor, & Inzlicht, 2010). In our original study, we tested whether right-oriented bias under approach motivation is more likely to appear when people have to act fast than when they have more time in which to override their automatic responses. Price and Wolfers challenge neither the theory nor the results of our experiment. Rather, they challenge whether approach motivation evokes right-oriented bias in goal-keepers during penalty shoot-outs.