ABSTRACT
A major gap in cognitive psychological theory is the lack of attention to the motivational wellsprings of human thought. What people think and how they think reflect in large measure their efforts to adjust to the demands of the objective environment and to maintain satisfying subjective states. McGuire and McGuire clearly recognize the importance of motivation. In their chapter (this volume), they are admirably explicit and explicitly eclectic in stating the functionalist assumptions that undergird their model of thought systems. Like attribution theorists, the McGuires argue that people are motivated to achieve cognitive mastery of the causal structure of their environment by understanding the “promotive” and “preventive” antecedents of events. A major goal becomes anticipating the likelihood of events and gaining causal leverage over them. Like expected utility theorists, the McGuires argue that people are motivated to estimate the net desirability of events by integrating information concerning the consequences of those events, and, like cognitive-affective consistency and psychodynamic theorists, they argue that thought serves “autistic needs” by helping us to maintain a gratifying hedonic congruence among our beliefs and preferences. Under certain conditions, our perceptions of an event’s desirability influence perceptions of the event’s likelihood (wishful-thinking), and our perceptions of an event’s likelihood influence estimates of its desirability (rationalization).
