Motivated Reasoning
Research on motivation has consistently shown that people are motivated to come to a desired conclusion (see Kunda 1990 for review). Building support through a broad sample of research, Kunda's (1990) theory of motivated reasoning posits that "people rely on cognitive processes and representations to arrive at their desired conclusions, but motivation plays a role in determining which of these will be used on a given occasion" (Kunda 1990, p. 480).
Kunda devotes much of the theory of motivated reasoning to motives arrived at through directional bias to reach a desired conclusion. Motivation affects reasoning "through reliance on a biased set of cognitive processes: strategies for accessing, constructing and evaluating beliefs" (p. 480). This occurs when people are motivated to reach a certain, desired conclusion, and they conduct a biased memory search to find justification for their decision. In order to persuade others that a decision is unbiased, an individual must find evidence in memory to justify the desired conclusion, which means that decisions are limited by prior beliefs (Kunda 1990). Directional goals can bias people in many ways, including bias toward or against a target person (Trope & Thompson 1997), bias against statistical reasoning when it does not support goals (Schaller 1992), and bias against scientific evidence if a person does not want to believe a conclusion (Klaczinski, Gordon and Fauth 1997).
In a study assessing the differential reasoning styles used to bias information in one's own favor, Schaller (1992) found that the motivation to see one's self in a favorable light can affect the inferential reasoning style chosen in a particular situation. Being a member of a social group can cause an individual to disregard statistical reasoning in order to see one's own group, the "in-group," in a favorable light (Schaller 1992, p. 62). This process of biased statistical reasoning may serve to maintain existing stereotypes or lead to the formation of new stereotypes about certain groups.
Further evidence of motivated reasoning is shown through participants' willingness to switch from simple to complex processing on a "moment-to-moment basis" in order to find support for goal-enhancing evidence rather than goal-threatening evidence (Klaczinski, Gordon and Fauth 1997, p. 481). Individuals are willing to employ complex reasoning when simple processing would be threatening to current beliefs, while they are willing to accept flawed scientific evidence when it supports their beliefs (Klaczinski, Gordon and Fauth 1997). Research in motivated skepticism has obtained similar results, finding that people are less critical of information that supports a desired or existing belief (Ditto and Lopez 1992). People are more likely to accept positive information without question, while they seek more evidence before accepting a conclusion that is inconsistent with prior beliefs (Ditto and Lopez 1992).
In addition to affecting the reasoning style employed by those motivated by biased expectations, motivated reasoning can also affect the way people gather information. Stereotypes of social groups can affect the type of information that individuals seek out about members of the stereotyped group, causing them to seek out less individuating information in order to make classification of the person into that social group easier (Trope and Thompson 1997).
Taken together, the body of research on motivated reasoning suggests that people are motivated to maintain existing, self-enhancing information. People are willing to exert extra cognitive effort in order to maintain existing beliefs, and they are also willing to accept flawed information and small sample sizes if it supports their beliefs. One of the ways that individuals can come to be biased by expectations is through the use of social norms and stereotypes as cues. Social norms tell us how a particular person should act in a given situation.
This paper examines the impact of gender norms on the recruitment process for creatives within the advertising agency, where women are underrepresented by a ration of 2.3 to 1. Drawing on the theory of motivated reasoning (Kunda 1990), this paper examines the impact of motivated directional bias on the reasoning style employed by individuals. Further, research and theory on social category bias and role congruity theory are examined with regard to their impact on females in male-dominated positions.