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This study investigated 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. The goal of forming impressions of the candidates, which was expected to lead to within‐candidate searching, was in fact modestly associated with weaker tendencies to do so, once effort was taken into account. Impression‐formation goals, however, were associated with less attribute‐based memory structures. The findings confirm 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.

This research focused on empirical connections between third-person effects and media orientations - general beliefs about news and characteristic uses of the news media. The study examined the contributions of three groups of independent variables, including political factors, media schemas, and media use, to third-person effects. Results of regression analyses suggest that each of the three groups of variables is modestly related to the magnitude of third-person effects, but none individually has great predictive power or necessarily alters third-person effects in a given news scenario. Finally, the mechanisms by which different variables influence the magnitude of third-person effects clearly vary. Overall, the results suggest only modest connections between individual differences in media orientations and the tendency to exhibit third- person effects.