When Thinking About Themselves and God, People Believe Truth Matters More than Control

People are fundamentally motivated to feel effective in the domains of both control (i.e., managing what happens in their lives) and truth (i.e., establishing what is real and right). However, previous research has not established whether individuals typically possess lay theories that either of these motives predominates over the other. Although major psychological theories historically have emphasized the primary importance of control, we found converging evidence across five studies that individuals tend to believe that truth (versus control) predominates. Participants reported believing that truth-oriented motives and goal pursuit activities are more important than control-oriented motives and goal pursuit activities. Furthermore, this prioritization of truth extended to another aspect of individuals’ core beliefs—their conceptualizations of God, whose omniscience (versus omnipotence) they saw as more central. These truth-dominant tendencies persisted even when assessed using implicit measures that probed which of the two motives participants more strongly associated with me (versus not me) as well as with God. Finally, a preregistered replication study found a consistent pattern of truth (versus control) motive predominance among adults from both the United States and India, cultures that differ on a number of motivation measures. These findings contribute to literatures on motivation and the cognitive science of religion by providing new insight into individuals’ lay theories about the relative importance of these two fundamental human motives to themselves and to God.