MOTIVATIONAL DETERMINANTS OF SYSTEMATIC PROCESSING - EXPECTANCY MODERATES EFFECTS OF DESIRED CONFIDENCE ON PROCESSING EFFORT

Extending the motivational assumptions of the heuristic-systematic mod el ( Chaiken, Liberman, & Eagly, 1989), the authors hypthesized that a discrepancy between desired and actual judgemental confidence raises processing effort only if the expectancy that processing will increase confidence is high. In Experiment 1,university students expected to r eview information for upcoming social judgements. Desired confidence w as varied through low versus high task importance. To manipulate expec tancy, low versus high perceived processing efficacy was induced via f eedback. As predicted, high- (as compared to low-) importance particip ants expressed greater interest in receiving information and selected more information when perceived efficacy was high, and this effect was mediated via a heightened discrepancy between desired and actual conf idence. These effects were not obtained under low perceived efficacy. In Experiment 2, students processed a persuasive message. Only high im portance conditions were studied; processing efficacy and argument str ength were manipulated. As predicted, high- (but not low-) efficacy pa rticipants processed the message systematically, as indicated by a dif ferent impact of argument strength and by mediational path analysis. I t is argued that the precision of social judgement models would benefi t from an explicit consideration of processing- and outcome-related ex pectancy variables. (C) 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.