Motivations, goals, information search, and memory about political candidates

In: Political psychology: journal of the International Society of Political Psychology, Band 22, Heft 4

Abstract

Investigates the ways in which motivations and goals affect patterns of political information-seeking and the consequent structure of memory about candidates. Undergraduate participants used a computerized system that displayed different layers of information about fictional political candidates; the system recorded the strategies they used to search through this information. Results showed that motivations to engage in effortful processing produced tendencies to engage in within-candidate searches, better recall, and memory structures, clustered by candidate. Confirms that the manner in which people acquire candidate information has important consequences for the way they store that information in memory and that these processes vary according to individual motivations and goals. (Original abstract - amended)