Social situations are informationally complex. In offices, classrooms, and malls, each person encounters many others with different characteristics doing different things, and therefore must selectively allocate cognitive processing to a smaller subset of individuals and characteristics. This selection, often automatic, can have important consequences. Dangerous sexual decisions can result from selectively attending to romantic goals and inhibiting attention to potential costs. Prejudicial behavior toward members of racial and ethnic out-groups can stem from selective cognitive processes following self-protective goal activation. We propose that fundamental social goals govern the selective and automatic allocation of cognitive resources, concentrating here on two such goals --- self-protection and mating. Activating each goal is proposed to have both excitatory and inhibitory effects, selectively facilitating attention to others with goal-relevant characteristics (e.g., ethnicity, gender, attractiveness) and inhibiting attention to those with goal-irrelevant characteristics. Twelve experiments are designed to: (1) identify effects of self-protection goals on attention to, memory for, and evaluation of specific categories of individuals in complex social situations; (2) identify effects of mating goals on attention, memory, and evaluation; (3) examine how activation of one goal (e.g., self-protection) may suppress cognitive processes associated with a different goal (e.g., mating); and (4) examine asymmetries in this cross-modal suppression. Stimuli consist of arrays of faces varying in sex, attractiveness, and race. Goals will be activated via either semantic primes or movie/music manipulations. Dependent variables include attention measured via eye-tracker or """"""""change blindness"""""""" (Studies 1-6), encoding/categorization measured by attributions of emotion to neutral faces (7-8), implicit evaluation (9-10), and behavioral decisions to enter or leave social situations (11-12). The program of research will contribute new information concerning the role of social goals in directing selective perception and cognition; supplement ecologically-inspired theories of motivation and cognition with empirical tests of earlier speculations; and supplement practical knowledge about risks and consequences of social decision-making with evidence on foundational attentional and cognitive bases on which those decisions are made
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