Valenced social information and the temporal location of thought

Abstract

This study examined the hypothesis that negative social information attracts more processing resources than positive social information. Ninety‐three women were asked to choose which of two male students was the better writer. Half the subjects were told that they would return in the future to write an essay on abortion with the student chosen as the better writer. Orthogonally, one of the male students was portrayed as either likable (positive social information), dislikable (negative social information), or subjects received no social information about the student. It was predicted that, because of the tendency to divert processing resources to planning for the future interaction, subjects in the positive and no social information conditions would perform more poorly on a proof‐reading task when there was a prospect for future interaction than when there was not. Negative social information, on the other hand, was expected to bind processing resources to the current task, and consequently, subjects faced with the prospect of working with the dislikable student were not predicted to show a performance decrement on the proof‐reading task. Results supported these predictions. Limitations of the current study and implications of the results for current models of motivated reasoning are discussed.