Motivated Social Cognition About Social Justice

Abstract

Abstract Barriers to veridical perceptions of the surrounding world threaten the foundations of democratic participation. In response to evidence of increasing divergence in information processing across ideological groups, scholarship on motivated social cognition has increasingly sought to tackle problems that are sociopolitical in nature. This chapter supplements and complements the review of “hot” political cognition published in the first edition of this handbook by synthesizing important advances of the past decade. The chapter draws from several disciplines, focusing on findings that clearly (a) indicate the presence of motivation and (b) demonstrate an impact on information processing. To continue advancing basic psychological science—and contribute to a more just society—the chapter makes recommendations for moving beyond mere documentation of these phenomena to (a) distinguishing underlying cognitive mechanisms, (b) identifying fundamental dispositional and situational moderators, (c), interrogating effect magnitude and generalizability, and, most importantly, (d) grounding these findings in overarching theoretical frameworks.