Ziva Kunda
Ziva Kunda (June 13, 1955 – February 24, 2004) was an Israeli
Biography
Ziva Kunda was born in Tel Aviv.[4] Her parents were from Oudtshoorn, a small South African town. They immigrated from different parts of Europe to Oudtshoorn to find safety from the persecutions of Jews before and during World War II.[4] In Kunda's autobiography, she shares her parents' background, their parents, and her early childhood.[4] In 2004, Kunda died from cancer. She is survived by her husband Paul Thagard, a professor of philosophy at the University of Waterloo, and two sons.[5]
Academic career
Kunda obtained her
Research and publications
Motivated reasoning
Kunda's 1990 article, "The Case for Motivated Reasoning,[2]" outlines a comprehensive set of research and theory to provide evidence that motivations for a desired outcome affect the process of reasoning, including the formation of impressions, determining one's beliefs and attitudes, evaluating evidence, and making decisions. She makes a distinction between two major categories of the phenomena: accuracy-oriented motivated reasoning and goal-oriented motivated reasoning.
Kunda provides evidence to support
Kunda focuses the majority of the evidence for motivated reasoning on directional or goal-oriented motivated reasoning in which cognitive processes used to justify reasoning or judgement are biased by the motivation to reach a desired conclusion. Kunda writes that directional goals "affect reasoning by affecting which information will be considered in the reasoning process". She summarizes research indicating how directional goals may bias three cognitive reasoning processes:
- Accessing and construction of beliefs about the self, other people, and events. Kunda highlights the effects of motivation on memory search for pre-existing beliefs and self-knowledge as related to a desired attitude about oneself, others, and events or tasks. Examples include: the motivation to reduce cognitive dissonance, a desired an outcome that depends in some way on another person (i.e., outcome dependency), and the desirability for a particular outcome of some event (e.g., sporting match).
- Use of inferential rules. Kunda references studies that point to the phenomena that directional goals can lead people to use certain statistical heuristics to support their judgements. For example, people will the use the base rate information (or the representativeness heuristic) in the reasoning process when it aligns with the directional goal or desired judgment.
- Evaluation of scientific evidence by biasing the selection of both beliefs and rules. Kunda provides evidence to demonstrate how people's desire to believe or not believe scientific information affects the recruitment of prior beliefs and inferential rules about the information. For example, when the scientific evidence indicates that a behavior is unhealthy, those who engage in that behavior will deem that information weaker than those who do not engage in the behavior.
Kunda concludes that when one is motivated towards a particular conclusion or outcome, one feels obligated to construct a justification, and in doing so, they only access a biased subset of relevant beliefs and rules to arrive at that desired result.
Social cognition
In 1999, Kunda authored the textbook Social Cognition: Making Sense of People; one of the books she is well known for. In this book, Kunda begins by painting a picture of the birth of social psychology and
Kunda wrote as an overview of her research:
One line of my work examines how stereotypes are activated, used, and modified. Under what circumstances, for example, will the stereotypes of an ethnic or an occupational group come to mind as one is interacting with a member of these groups? How will a person's behavior influence which of the stereotypes relevant to that person are on one's mind? Under what circumstances will relevant stereotypes influence one's evaluation of a person? Another line of my work examines how outstanding individuals influence people's self-views and motivation. When will a superstar give rise to inspiration and self-enhancement, and when to discouragement and self-deflation?[6]
This contextual understanding of how people stereotype added a new dimension to this body of work. Specifically, Kunda's work with Stephen Spencer looked at temporal aspects of stereotyping in their paper "When Do Stereotypes Come to Mind and When Do They Color Judgment?"[7] They found that when someone is engaging with another individual in a stereotyped group, that person is not always thinking about the group's stereotype. When they do think about the stereotype, the stereotype does not always play a role in their judgements. Kunda also found that when stereotypes change, they usually do so incrementally or through causal reasoning.[8]
Legacy
Kunda's seminal work on motivated reasoning has influenced several fields of communication research including: media framing,[9][10] risk communication,[11][12][13] public opinion,[10][14] political communication,[15][16][14][17] misinformation,[15] social media effects,[17][16] science communication,[15][13][14][10] and climate change communication.[14]
See also
References
- ^ a b c d "Kunda CV" (PDF).
- ^ PMID 2270237.
- ^ "Society of Experimental Social Psychology". Retrieved March 14, 2021.
- ^ a b c "Kunda Autobiography".
- ^ "Psychology professor is mourned". Retrieved 2008-08-19.
- ^ a b "Kunda's profile on Social Psychology Network".
- ^ "When Do Stereotypes Come to Mind and When Do They Color Judgment?" (PDF).
- ^ "Forming Impressions from Stereotypes, Traits, and Behaviors" (PDF).
- Druckman, James N. "Google Scholar". Retrieved March 14, 2021.
- ^ a b c Scheufele, Dietram A. "Google Scholar". Retrieved March 14, 2021.
- ^ Klein, William M P. "Google Scholar". Retrieved March 14, 2021.
- ^ Ferrer, Rebecca. "Google Scholar". Retrieved March 14, 2021.
- ^ a b Brossard, Dominique. "Google Scholar". Retrieved March 14, 2021.
- ^ a b c d Nisbet, Erik. "Google Scholar". Retrieved March 14, 2021.
- ^ a b c Emily, Vraga. "Google Scholar". Retrieved March 14, 2021.
- ^ a b Edgerly, Stephanie. "Google Scholar". Retrieved March 14, 2021.
- ^ a b Wojcieszak, Magdalena. "Google Scholar". Retrieved March 14, 2021.