Abstract

This research compares motivation for accuracy with motivation for positive impression which is one of directional goals, focusing on their impacts on contrast and assimilation effects of priming, to understand the extent to which they affect the process of social judgment. Experiment 1 assesses the impacts of two motivations on contrast effects. The results of the experiment indicate that motivation for accuracy does not eliminate contrast effects, whereas motivation for positive impression does. Contrast effect implies that primed exemplars are used as comparison standard at judgment stage, not at encoding stage. Therefore, this experiment shows that motivation for accuracy does not affect judgment stage while motivation for positive impression does. Experiment 2 compares the impacts of two motivations on assimilative priming effects where they are activated before and after encoding, respectively. Priming effect was eliminated when motivation for accuracy was introduced before encoding, but was not eliminated when it was introduced after encoding. However, motivation for positive impression overwhelmed priming effects both before and after encoding. This result implies that motivation for accuracy affects only encoding stage, while motivation for positive impression affects both encoding and judgment stages. Therefore, we can conclude from these results that motivation for accuracy and motivation for positive impression make different impacts on social inference process.