This study examined the hypothesis that negative social information at
tracts more processing resources than positive social information. Nin
ety-three women were asked to choose which of two male students was th
e 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 t
he 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 mo
re 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 curre
nt 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 predictio
ns. Limitations of the current study and implications of the results f
or current models of motivated reasoning are discussed.