Ch 5: The motive perspective Flashcards
Underlying Assumption to Human Behaviour
- human behaviour is best understood as a reflection of underlying needs
- individual differences in needs may explain people’s behaviours
What is a Need?
-lack of something necessary for well-being
Internal directional force
- the lack of something necessary can motivate us
- this force determines how we seek/respond to environment
Positive needs
approach
Negative needs
avoidance
Primary needs
based on biological nature
- food, sleep, water
- must be satisfied repeatedly over time
Secondary needs
psychological based
-power, achievement, affiliation
Needs & behaviour
- the stronger the need, the more intense the action
- helps set priorities
- needs result in and work through motives
- people have multiple needs & motives
Basic Elements: Motives
- influenced by underlying needs
- close to behaviour
- when motives are strong they influence behaviour strongly
Press (pressure)
- an external force that influences motives, creates desire or avoidance of something beyond need
ex: peers (marriage/children —-> motive for relationship)
Needs & Press
needs might fuse: gain both achievement & affiliation at work
- needs might serve eachother: order & achievement
- needs might in conflict: autonomy & affiliation (ex teenagers)
Motive States
-motives vary across time & situations(states)
Motive Dispositions
- ppl generally have different levels of needs (dispositions) which influence behaviour
- some ppl naturally have more of a given need than others
- helps from a picture of personality
Motive Strengths:
shift depending on need being satisfied; resulting in different behaviours
Murray’s System of Needs (1938)
- emphasizes universal basic needs
- focuses on secondary psych needs
- generated lists of needs that underlie personality
Dispositional Tendencies (Murray’s system of needs 1938)
- recognizes differing dispositional need levels among people; leads to uniqueness of personality
- everyone has some basic needs; but have dispositional tendencies toward a particular level of that need
Thematic Apperception Test (TAT) by Murray & Morgan (1935)
assesses latent needs by presenting a set of ambiguous pictures and asking people to tell a detailed story
-latent needs: projected into the story’s content
dispositional tendencies: emerge over multiple pictures
TAT Scoring
- difficult & long
- requires intensive training
Apperception
-perceiving stimuli in light of one’s own experiences and motives
Underlying Assumptions for TAT (2)
Manifest needs: needs reflected in OVERT behaviour
Latent needs: needs not reflected in behaviour
Achievement
attaining goals, overcoming obstacles
- people low in need for achievement prefer tasks that are either very easy or very hard
- doing poorly on a hard problem doesn’t reflect badly on them & there’s always the possibility of success
people high in need for achievement tend to prefer tasks of moderate difficulty & work harder on these moderately difficult tasks than on very hard ones or very easy ones.
Affiliation
building relationships, choosing to be with others
Power
dominance, controlling people, narcissistic, want to be seen as authoritative & influential
-ppl with high need for power & strong sense of responsibility: power motive yields a conscientious pursuit of prestige & is expressed in socially accepted ways
When The Need for Power becomes problematic
-for those w/o sense of responsibility: the power motive leads to problematic ways of influencing others, aggressiveness, sexual exploitation, alcohol & drug abuse
Patterned needs
patterns of several needs at once, sometimes in combination w/ other characteristics
ex: a low need for affiliation + a high need for power
Inhibited power motivation
being low in need for affiliation let’s the person make tough decisions w/o worrying about being disliked
(a person high in need for power)
Inhibiting the use of power
-means the person will want to follow orderly procedures & stay within the norms
(a person high in self control)
Incentives
- the degree to which a given action can satisfy a need for you
- personalized weighting of how relevant an act is to the need
- determines how a motive is expressed in actions
- accounts for behavioural diversity
- Relates to (conscious) choices of action within a domain vs. needs (influence behaviour at non-conscious level)
Needs & Incentives
-both influence behavior but in different ways
Implicit motive
-person may or may not be aware of them
(motives)
-more basic, primitive & autonomic
-ex “the feeling of doing better” for the need of achievement
-good predictors of broad behavioral tendencies over time
Self-attributed motive
-what’s measured by self reports
(incentives)
-relate to specific action goals & they are better at predicting responses in structured settings
Picture Story Excersie (PSE)
people are viewing a set of ambiguous pictures, in which it isn’t clear what’s happening. They’re asked to create a story about each picture. The story should describe what’s happening, the characters’ thoughts and feelings, their relationships to eachother and the outcome of the situation
- through apperception, the themes that are manifested in the stories reflect the story-teller’s implicit motives
- most associated w/motive perspective
Scoring for Achievement motive
events that involve overcoming obstacles, attaining goals & having positive feelings about those activities
Scoring for Affiliation motive
events in which people choose to be with other people and stories that emphasize relationships among people
Scoring for Power motive
controlling others
Personlogy
the study of individual lives & the factors that influence their course
-more meaningful because of its emphasis on the persons; life history
Trait+ Situation = Behaviour
- interindividual differences
- describes stability/struture
- interaction between traits and external factors
Need&Press + Motive = Behaviour
- intraindividual differences
- explains change and stability
- direct link between inner state and experience
- external factors part of model: influence of press
Personality Research Form (PRF)
Good internal consistency and test-retest reliability
Multi-Motive Grind
- Combines aspects of TAT with questionnaire
- 18 pictures presented (1-4 only warm-up), variety of situations linked to performance, control, social acceptance
- Statements that represent important motives
- easy to score
6 Variables for MMG
Achievement: hope for success, fear of failure
Power: desire for control, fear of loss of power
Affiliation: hope for social acceptance, fear of rejection
Behaviour
- a system of multiple needs
- each motive exists in everyone
- the changing balance of the relative intensity of needs at any given time
