It is proposed that motivation may affect reasoning through reliance on a biased set of cognitive processes--that is, strategies for accessing, constructing, and evaluating beliefs. The motivation to be accurate enhances use of those beliefs and strategies that are considered most appropriate, whereas the motivation to arrive at particular conclusions enhances use of those that are considered most likely to yield the desired conclusion. There is considerable evidence that people are more likely to arrive at conclusions that they want to arrive at, but their ability to do so is constrained by their ability to construct seemingly reasonable justifications for these conclusions. These ideas can account for a wide variety of research concerned with motivated reasoning.

In 3 studies, the authors demonstrated that individuals are motivated by role models who encourage strategies that fit their regulatory concerns: Promotion-focused individuals, who favor a strategy of pursuing desirable outcomes, are most inspired by positive role models, who highlight strategies for achieving success; prevention-focused individuals, who favor a strategy of avoiding undesirable outcomes, are most motivated by negative role models, who highlight strategies for avoiding failure. In Studies 1 and 2, the authors primed promotion and prevention goals and then examined the impact of role models on motivation. Participants' academic motivation was increased by goal-congruent role models but decreased by goal-incongruent role models. In Study 3, participants were more likely to generate real-life role models that matched their chronic goals.

The authors propose that superstars are most likely to affect self-views when they are considered relevant. Relevant superstars provoke self-enhancement and inspiration when their success seems attainable but self-deflation when it seems unattainable. Participants' self-views were affected only when the star's domain of excellence was self-relevant. Relevant stars provoked self-enhancement and inspiration when their success seemed attainable in that participants either still had enough time to achieve comparable success or believed their own abilities could improve over time. Open-ended responses provided rich evidence of inspiration in these circumstances. Relevant stars provoked, if anything, self-deflation when their success seemed unattainable in that participants either had already missed the chance to achieve comparable success or viewed their abilities as fixed and so unlikely to improve.It is a cultural clich6 that superstars, that is, individuals of outstanding achievement, can serve as role models to others, inspiring and motivating them to do their utmost best. To promote such inspiration, prominent women scientists are often invited to address high school girls, eminent African Americans are introduced to African American children, and outstanding employees are profiled in corporate newsletters and bulletin boards. In the domain of public policy, affirmative action plans are often justified on the grounds that they will create role models who will inspire members of disadvantaged groups. In both the public and private sector, there are countless examples of programs showcasing the talents or successes of a superior individual that are designed to boost the aspirations and selfimages of a particular target group.However, our culture also holds the opposite clich6, that superstars can demoralize and deflate less outstanding others. This notion was brilliantly captured in the movie Amadeus (Forman, 1984) in the image of Salieri, the accomplished musician whose self-view, indeed whose whole life, was shattered by exposure to Mozart's genius. More familiar everyday scripts include the image of the "superwoman" who makes other, less extraordinary women feel incompetent by comparison and the image of the perfectly competent child who is demoralized by a gifted

The authors propose a parallel-constraint-satisfaction theory of impression formation that assumes that social stereotypes and individuating information such as traits or behaviors constrain each other's meaning and jointly influence impressions of individuals. Building on models of text comprehension (W. Kintsch, 1988), the authors describe a connectionist model that can account for the major findings on how stereotypes affect impressions of individuals in the presence of different kinds of individuating information; how stereotypes, behaviors, and traits affect each other's meaning; and how multiple stereotypes jointly affect impressions. Most of these findings can be modeled by constraint networks, which suggests that they may be due to relatively automatic processes that require little conscious inference. The authors also point to a small number of phenomena that involve more controlled processes. The advantages of the authors' parallel model over serial models are discussed.How friendly is the person you have just met at the party? How aggressive is your neighbor? How decisive is President Clinton? Your answers to such questions may be shaped by your understanding of the implications of these people's behavior, profession, age, sex, ethnicity, interpersonal relations, personality traits, physical appearance, abilities, goals, family background, or any other information about them that you consider relevant. These diverse varieties of information that can shape our impressions of others are typically classified by social psychologists into two major kinds-stereotypes and individuating information (Brewer, 1988;Fiske & Neuberg, 1990;Locksley, Hepburn, & Ortiz, 1982). Stereotypes refer to membership in social categories such as sex, race, age, or profession that are believed to be associated with certain traits and behaviors. Individuating information refers to anything else known about the individual-behavior (e.g., hit someone), personality (e.g., introverted), family circumstances (e.g., has two brothers), etc. As we shall discuss later, the distinction between these two kinds of information is not always clear. But many theorists have treated them as qualitatively different, and a great deal of theoretical and empirical effort has gone into determining how an

The self-concept literature is characterized by a continuing controversy over whether the self-concept is stable or malleable. In this article we suggest that it is both but that the stability observed for general descriptions of the self may mask significant local variation. In this study the social environment was varied by creating a situation in which subjects found themselves to be either very unique or very similar to others. Following this manipulation, subjects responded to a series of self-concept measures. Although the uniqueness and similarity subjects did not differ in the trait terms they used to describe themselves, they did differ systematically in their latency for these judgments, in positivity and negativity of their word associations, and in their judgments of similarity to reference groups. These findings imply that subjects made to feel unique recruited conceptions of themselves as similar to others, whereas subjects made to feel similar to others recruited conceptions of themselves as unique. The results suggest that very general self-descriptive measures are inadequate for revealing how the individual adjusts and calibrates the self-concept in response to challenges from the social environment.