The neuroscience of motivated cognition Brent L. Hughes and Jamil Zaki Department of Psychology, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305, USA Goals and needs shape individuals’ thinking, a phenome- non known as motivated cognition. We highlight research from social psychology and cognitive neuroscience that provides insight into the structure of motivated cognition. In addition to demonstrating its ubiquity, we suggest that motivated cognition is often effortless and pervades information processing. The pervasive influence of motivation on cognition People often believe that their thinking aims squarely at gaining an accurate impression of reality. Upon closer inspection, this assumption collapses. Instead, like the inhabitants of Garrison Keillor’s Lake Woebegon, individ- uals often see themselves and close others as possessing unrealistically high levels of positive attributes such as likeability, morality, and attractiveness. This bias persists among individuals who should know better: over 90% college professors believe their work is better than that of their peers, CIA analysts overestimate the accuracy of their predictions for future events, and doctors overconfi- dently estimate their medical knowledge [1]. These cases exemplify the phenomenon of motivated cognition, by which the goals and needs of individuals steer their thinking towards desired conclusions [1–3]. A variety of motivations pervasively shapes cognition (Box 1). For exam- ple, people wish to live in a coherent and consistent world. This leads people to recognize patterns where there are none, perceive control over random events, and shift their attitudes to be consistent with their past behaviors [2,3]. Peo- ple also need to feel good about themselves and about others with whom they identify. As such, people often self-enhance, evaluating themselves as having more desirable personal- ities and rosier future prospects than their peers, and taking personal credit for successes, but not failures [1–3]. People likewise elevate their relationship partners and in-group members (e.g., people who share their political affiliation) in demonstrably unrealistic ways [3,4]. Motivations can also have the opposite effect, leading people to derogate out- group members, even when the lines that divide ‘us’ from ‘them’ are defined de novo by researchers [3,4]. Motivated cognition across the information processing stream Motivation not only shapes what people think, but also how they think. Decades of psychological research identify mechanisms through which motivation affects cognition (Box 1), but it has only recently become a focus of neurosci- entific research. These recent efforts converge with behav- ioral approaches to provide insights into the structure of motivated cognition (Box 2). Together, these efforts suggest that motivated cognition pervades information processing at various stages, including perception, attention, and deci- sion-making. Although these processes are intricately relat- ed and frequently interact, we use them here as an organizing principle to briefly summarize how motivations affect what people see, how they think, and what they decide. Perception A research tradition dating back to the ‘New Look’ move- ment demonstrates that motives influence what people see. For example, people tend to see desirable objects as being physically closer to them, and tend to imbue ambiguous stimuli (e.g., similar shades of a color) with interpretations associated with reward [5]. Recent neuroscientific investi- gations echo these findings. In one recent study, partici- pants viewed arrays of moving dots whose direction of motion was difficult to discern, and decided which direction they were predominantly moving [6]. Before seeing these arrays, participants learned that they would receive a re- ward if the dots predominantly moved in a particular direc- tion. People tended to see the dots moving in the direction associated with reward, and did so by biasing their visual search in favor of the desired perception. Moreover, occipital regions involved in perceptual encoding, and prefrontal regions involved in top-down control, were modulated by these motivational effects on vision (Figure 1 and [6]). Motivation also shapes people’s visual perception of themselves and others. For example, people see their own faces and those of close others as being more physically attractive than they really are [7], and in-group faces as being more distinct and likable than out-group faces [4]. In one recent study, participants viewed images of their own face morphed with positive (i.e., trustworthy) or negative (i.e., untrustworthy) faces, and evaluated the extent to which each morph looked like them [7]. Participants iden- tified more-trustworthy morphs as being more similar to themselves than were less-trustworthy morphs. As the similarity between the untrustworthy morphs and the self decreased, activation in occipitotemporal structures asso- ciated with facial encoding and prefrontal regions involved in top-down control increased. Taken together, these data suggest that motivation influences lower-level perception towards desired conclusions and away from undesired conclusions. In addition, they suggest that top-down pro- cesses (reflected by prefrontal cortical activation) influence lower-level perception by biasing visual search in the direction of desired conclusions [8]. Science & Society 1364-6613/ ß 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2014.12.006 Corresponding author: Hughes, B.L. (blhughes@stanford.edu). Keywords: motivation; self-enhancement; cognitive dissonance; intergroup bias; cognitive control; automaticity. 62 Trends in Cognitive Sciences, February 2015, Vol. 19, No. 2