When Expectancy Meets Desire: Motivational Effects in Reconstructive Memory

Two studies investigated the effects of motivational factors on expectancy use in reconstructive memory. Participants were given a target's midterm grades for later recall; expectancies about the target's future performance were then manipulated. Participants' desires to see their expectancies confirmed were manipulated by making the target likable or unlikable. The authors hypothesized that when expectancy and liking "matched," participants would give significant weight to their expectancies at retrieval, resulting in expectancy-congruent distortion of the midterm grades. However, when expectancy and liking were "mismatched," expectancies would be discounted, and participants would show little or no expectancy-congruent distortion. Results supported these predictions. Study 2 varied the order of the expectancy and liking information. Order affected the process by which mismatch participants discounted their expectancies. Results demonstrate that motivations not only may bias memory search but also may affect the reconstruction of existing memory traces.