Psyche people, help me with a phrase - how do you define "Motivated Social Cognition"?

[Rabrrrrrr]

It's from the title of a paper: "Political Conservatism as Motivated social cognition".

I know what the three words mean alone, but I'm having a difficult time wrapping my head around the phrase.

The article is absolutely fascinating, and kind of funny, making political conservatism almost a kind of pathology based on fear-avoidance, a need for disambiguity, an ability to handle change, and high trust in (or more likely, a strong need for) authority.

But my lack of understanding this phrase is keeping me from fully understanding the article.

Does it mean that there is a personal will (motive) to understand society in that way?

Or does it mean that the brain, outside of the conscious self, forms itself into a certain way in order to handle dealing with other people/make order of the social world"?

Or something else?

And while I ask that you feel free to answer it specifically in relation to the article at and, I am also curious if you can define the phrase alone, without reference to the "political conservatism", and put it in a generic context.

Thanks!

[La Lioness Priyanka]

1. i think its procesing and encoding information with a preformed bias

i.e. i think black people are the reason the world is falling apart, so i search for information, remember information and recall this information better than any other opposing information.

[Rabrrrrrr]

2. That could be it! That seems to jive with what the article is getting at.

I certainly see a lot of that in the conservative Christian shit - especially the Creation Science and Intelligence Design bullshit - that I read.

"Because these data points don't fit my preconceived notion that the Bible is absolute fact, we'll throw them away".

Thanks!

[La Lioness Priyanka]

3. actually we all do that to a degree, because people dont like to have cognitive dissonance

selected perception is something we all indulge in to a degree.

( i am glad to see that my excrutiatingly expensive undergrad expensive paid off today :P)

[Inchworm]

4. Now I'm interested

Cognitive dissonance?

conflicting thoughts?

:shrug:

[La Lioness Priyanka]

5. cognitive dissonance

is a tendency for individuals to seek consistency among their beliefs, opinions etc. if we have two conflicting cognitions, we are typically unconfortable and find ways to minimize them.

[tigereye]

7. and there are many interesting social psych experiements

that indicate that sometimes we don't have to go as far to change our perspective/attitudes (if properly motivated) as one would think!

(reaching way back here for stuff I read in grad school) :hi:

[Rabrrrrrr]

9. Like "All the Republican candidates are pro-torture" and "all proclaim to be Super Christians"

:rofl:

That causes me a lot of of cognitive dissonance!



(In the interest of honesty, that first phrase really should say "All the Republican candidates except John McCain are pro-torture", but the subject line doesn't have room for that much)

[tigereye]

6. hmm, I had to reference my social psych studies and think about Bandura

something I have not done for a while. And then there is the cognitive psychlogy perspective as well. ;)

that's an interesting article, what I saw of it, anyway. I can see why the cons would he upset....

I suppose you could say that, in the most simplistic fashion, that cons are consistently looking for information that reinforces their particular view of the world, however, you could probably say that about most of us, that we develop schema to interpret our world and then utilize them as needed. This also is the foundation of a lot of learning theory as well. I would be curious to see how they apply data to this and what it looks like...

It's a very large area of research, overall, maybe you could consider it for your next career, Rabrrrrrr.

thanks for pointing it out. I should note that there are surely some cog psych and social psych folks here who can enlighten you more.

[Rabrrrrrr]

8. So it would seem that "motivated social cognition" is a kind of pathology, then

Though we all exercise to one degree or another, it sounds like "motivated social cognition" is something that is NOT a healthy activity, that psychologists put a value judgment on it of "bad"; or if not "bad", at least, "best if avoided".

So what would be the alternative (or alternatives) to "motivated social cognition", other than "non-motivated social cognition"? Taoism?

And how do we know, then, that liberalism (or perhaps political non-conservatism) isn't its own form of "motivated social cognition"?

[tigereye]

11. no, I don't think social cognition itself is pathological

it's pretty common and it can be functionional, I think. But it seems (and I am not a social psych, btw) that it is a common thing for many folks to do and in this case pathological (well, if you accept their premise that conservatism is a form of pathology...)l or limited types of thinking are reinforced. Negative attitudes only seek out things that will reinforce them?


here's a quickie read on Social Cognition.... and actually, the wiki page on it isn't too bad....

http://chiron.valdosta.edu/whuitt/col/soccog/soccog.html

[TrogL]

10. Link to the paper?

here's a good one I found

http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~altemey/