2 - The Structure of Interdependence Shapes Social Cognition in Relationships

Summary

Mutual responsiveness is necessary to sustain a close relationship and, to achieve it, people must protect their overall motivation to act in a caring way against the costs naturally arising from the challenges of maintaining interdependence. These challenges are universal and require solutions that constitute relatively automatic habit structures. The solutions allow people to “keep their eyes on the prize” and sustain their overall rewards without being distracted by the localized costs that occur along the way. For instance, one important challenge involves partners’ behavior that will on occasion interfere with one’s personal goals, by either pursuing their own interests first or failing to coordinate dyadic goals. In a case of motivation cognition, the automatic response to such experiences is to rationalize the negative, costly behavior by exaggerating the partners’ positive features and compensating cognitively for it. However, consistent with the MODE model, if people have the cognitive resources for deliberation, those whose broader goals are more self-protective rather than connective will overturn the pro-relationship impulses, to their ultimate detriment. Research exploring three different automatic procedural rules that illustrate this process of motivated cognition will be described.