A functional basis for structure-seeking: Exposure to structure promotes willingness to engage in motivated action.
Abstract
A recurring observation of experimental psychologists is that people prefer, seek out, and even selectively "see" structure in their social and natural environments. Structure-seeking has been observed across a wide range of phenomena--from the detection of patterns in random arrays to affinities for order-providing political, religious, social, and scientific worldviews--and is exacerbated under psychological threat. Why are people motivated for structure? An intriguing, but untested, explanation holds that perceiving structure, even in domains unrelated to one's current behavioral context, can facilitate willingness to take goal-directed actions. Supporting this, in 5 studies, reminders of structure in nature or society increase willingness to engage in goal pursuit.
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Different runs of GPT-3.5 gave human-like answers when asked about their long-term goal in the Kay et al. (2014) survey.
“To illustrate, in the survey of Kay et al. (2014) on whether structure promotes goal pursuit, different runs of GPT-3.5 gave human-like answers when asked about their long-term goal.”
From Diminished diversity-of-thought in a standard large language model (2024) · cites this paper as Kay et al. (2014)
For the Kay et al. (2014) study, the GPT sample successfully replicated the Many Labs 2 result but did not replicate the original result.
“For the study of Kay et al. (2014), our GPT sample successfully replicated the Many Labs 2 result but did not replicate the original result.”
From Diminished diversity-of-thought in a standard large language model (2024) · cites this paper as Kay et al. (2014)
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- Authors
- Kay, A. C., Laurin, K., Fitzsimons, G. M., & Landau, M. J.
- Affiliations
- Duke University (US)
- Stanford University (US)
- University of Kansas (US)
- Venue
- Journal of Experimental Psychology: General
- Published
- 2014
- Volume
- 143
- Issue
- 2
- Pages
- 486-491
- ISSN
- 0096-3445 (ISSN-L)
- 1939-2222
- OpenAlex
- W2312380053
- Cited by
- 93
- References
- 28
- Citations by year
- 2026: 2 · 2025: 6 · 2024: 3 · 2023: 3 · 2022: 8 · 2021: 3 · 2020: 17 · 2019: 7 · 2018: 12 · 2017: 13 · 2016: 6 · 2015: 4 · 2014: 8 · 2013: 1
- FWCI
- 19.55
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- Journal of Experimental Psychology General (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Social and Intergroup Psychology
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Applied Psychology › Behavioral Health and Interventions
- Social Sciences › Decision Sciences › General Decision Sciences › Decision-Making and Behavioral Economics
- Keywords
- pattern perception, goal pursuit, psychological threat
- MeSH terms
- Adult, Female, Goals, Humans, Male, Models, Psychological, Motivation, Perception, Comprehension, Young Adult
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
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