Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 1998, Vol. 75, No. 1,53-69 Copyright 1998 by the American Psychological Association, Inc. 0022-3514/98/S3.00 Motivated Sensitivity to Preference-Inconsistent Information Peter H. Ditto University of California, Irvine James A. Scepansky Longwood College Geoffrey D. Munro Hope College Anne Marie Apanovitch Yale University Lisa K. Lockhart Kent State University If preference-inconsistent information initiates more effortful cognitive analysis than does preference- consistent information, then people should be more sensitive processors of information they do not want to believe than of information they do want to believe. Three studies supported this prediction. Study 1 found that inferences drawn from favorable interpersonal feedback revealed a correspondence bias, whereas inferences drawn from unfavorable feedback were sensitive to situational constraint. Study 2 showed this sensitivity to the quality of unfavorable feedback to disappear under cognitive load. Study 3 showed that evaluations of the accuracy of favorable medical diagnoses were insensitive to the probability of alternative explanation, whereas evaluations of unfavorable diagnoses were sensitive to probability information. The importance of adaptive considerations in theories of moti- vated reasoning is discussed. Experimental psychology has seen few problems as nettle- some as understanding and documenting the influence of wishes, needs, hopes, and fears in human judgment. Beginning with the dispute regarding the phenomenon of perceptual defense that became the Achilles' heel of the "New Look" movement in the 1940s and 1950s (Bruner & Postman, 1947a, 1947b; Erdelyi, 1974; Erickson, 1958; Goldiamond, 1958) and continuing with the cognition-motivation debate regarding the nature of self- serving attributional bias in the 1970s and 1980s (Bradley, 1978; Miller & Ross, 1975; Nisbett & Ross, 1980; Tetlock & Levi, 1982), the simple proposition that what people believe can be shaped by what they want (or want not) to believe has proven to be a deceptively controversial idea. The explicit focus of most of this controversy has revolved around the difficulty of ruling out nonmotivational counterex- planations for putatively motivational phenomena such as per- ceptual defense and self-serving bias (e.g., Howes & Soloman, Peter H. Ditto, Department of Psychology and Social Behavior, School of Social Ecology, University of California, Irvine; James A. Scepansky, Department of Psychology, Longwood College; Geoffrey D. Munro, Department of Psychology, Hope College; Anne Marie Apanovitch, De- partment of Psychology, Yale University; Lisa K. Lockhart, Department of Psychology, Kent State University. Study 1 was based on a master's thesis completed by James A. Scepan- sky under the direction of Peter H. Ditto. We thank Steve Fein and Bill von Hippel for their helpful comments on an earlier version of the article and Peggy Dombroski and Mark Hicks for their help in data collection. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Peter H. Ditto, Department of Psychology and Social Behavior, 3340 Social Ecology II, University of California, Irvine, California 92697-7085. Electronic mail may be sent to phditto@uci.edu. 1950; Miller & Ross, 1975). And yet, the fact that this empirical controversy has persisted for five decades despite the accumula- tion of a diverse body of studies for which nonmotivational explanation is very implausible (e.g., Brown & Rogers, 1991; Chapman & Feather, 1972; Ditto, Jemmott, & Darley, 1988; Dunning, Leuenberger, & Sherman, 1995; Gollwitzer, Earle, & Stephan, 1982; Miller, 1976; Sales & Haber, 1968; Sicoly & Ross, 1977; Stephan & Gollwitzer, 1981; M. Weiner, 1955) suggests that the tenacity of these empirical critiques has deeper roots in problems existing at a theoretical or even metatheoreti- cal level. Perhaps the key obstacle facing research on motivated reason- ing has been a view of motivationally based biases in judgment as fundamentally different from (and inherently more mysteri- ous than) other forms of judgment bias (Erdelyi, 1974; Nis- bett & Ross, 1980; Tetlock & Levi, 1982). That is, unlike "cog- nitive' ' errors and biases that can be explained as unintentional miscues of imperfect (but essentially functional) information- processing strategies, motivated phenomena such as self-serving bias have always been viewed as "paradoxical" in that they seem to imply an intentional distortion of reality that is both necessarily self-deceptive (Erdelyi, 1974) and adaptively count- erproductive (Jones & Gerard, 1967; Nisbett & Ross, 1980). This view, compounded by a lack of theoretical specificity re- garding how motivational forces are thought to affect judgment outcomes (Tetlock & Levi, 1982), has led motivational explana- tions to be viewed as second-class theoretical citizens, only to be entertained if a cognitive explanation (no matter how convoluted) cannot be constructed (e.g., Nisbett & Ross, 1980). Although the last few years have witnessed a general breakdown of this barrier between motivational and cognitive processes (Higgins & Sorrentino, 1990; Kruglanski, 1996; Sorrentino & 53