Causal Uncertainty & Related Goal Structures

为了生存的目的，人们会尽可能准确地发展对世界的认知理解。当他们对准确理解的主观感觉变得紧张时（例如，由于意外事件），人们通常会对不确定性的来源做出警觉的反应，并采取一些行动来改善他们的知识状态。有人提出，减少不确定性的动机的最重要来源是一个人可能无法理解事件的相对不变的原因。当一个人对自己识别因果关系的能力不确定时，就会对自己对现实的感知和有效控制的能力产生怀疑。目前的研究重点是因果不确定性信念的概念。这些实验考察了与因果不确定性信念相关的认知过程，以及这种信念的一些动机后果。本研究对理解人们对不利环境的反应、人类动机的认知基础以及社会信息加工的个体差异具有重要意义。

People are motivated for survival purposes to develop cognitive understandings of the world that are as accurate as possible. When their subjective sense of accurate understanding becomes strained (e.g., by unexpected events), people typically respond with an alerting response to the source of the uncertainty and they take some action to improve their state of knowledge. It is proposed that the most important source of a motivation for uncertainty reduction is one's potential failure to understand the relatively unchanging causes of events. When a person is uncertain about their ability to identify cause and effect relationships, it is expected to create doubt about one's perception of reality and one's ability to exercise effective control. The current research focuses on the concept of causal uncertainty beliefs. The experiments examine cognitive processes that are associated with causal uncertainty beliefs, and some of the motivational consequences of such beliefs. This research has important implications for understanding people's responses to adverse circumstances, the cognitive bases of human motivation, and individual differences in social information processing.