Chapter 5 The Motive Perspective Flashcards
Needs
- An internal state that’s less than satisfactory, a lack of something necessary for well-being
- Henry Murray (1938): a need as an internal directional force that determines how people seek out or respond to objects or situations in the environment
- Biological or others- either derive from biological needs or are inherent in our psychological makeup
- Biological needs must be satisfied repeatedly over time
- As time passes, the needs gradually become more intense, and the person acts to cause the needs to be satisfied.
- The strength of a need influences the intensity of the related behavior. The stronger the need, the more intense the action.
- Intensity can be expressed in less obvious ways
- Set priorities- which action you do first
- Needs are directive: which of many possible actions occurs at a given time
- Concerns something in particular
- Pertain to classes of goal objects or events
- Create movement either towrd the object or away from it- get something or avoid something
Motives
- A step closer to behavior
- Needs work through motives.
- David McClelland: motives are clusters of cognitions with affective overtones, organized around preferred experiences and goals.
- Appear in your thoughts and preoccupations
- Pertain to goals that are either desired or undesired
- Emotionally toned
- Motives eventually produce actions
- Ex: Need for food- occurs in the tissues of the body
- Hunger- mental state, experienced directly
- Creates mental preoccupation and leads to behavior to reduce the hunger
- Distinguish needs from motives partly by the existence of a subjective experience
- Need- physical condition you don’t sense directly
- Creates a motivational state that you do experience
Press
- Murray (1938)
- External influences
- External condition that creates a desire to get (or avoid) something
- Motivational influence
Dispositional motives
- Some people naturally have more of a given motive much of the time than other people do
- Form a picture of the person’s personality
Apperception
- Morgan and Murray (1935)
- Needs are projected into a person’s fantasy, just as a movie is projected onto a screen
- From psychoanalytic theory
- Thematic Apperception Test (TAT)
Picture story exercise (PSE)
- Procedure in TAT’s various forms
* Study several motive dispositions in detail
Need for achievement
- David McClelland, John Atkinson, and many others
- The desire to do things well, to feel pleasure in overcoming obstacles
- PSE responses that mention performing well at something, reaching goals or overcoming obstacles to goal attainment, having positive feelings about success, or negative feelings about failure
- People low in need for achievement prefer tasks that are either very easy or very hard.
- Relates to greater persistence in the face of failure, better task performances, higher grades, and greater educational achievement among 20,000 students in Holland
- Economic rise and decline of entire cultures
- Achievement motive has been linked to lower effectiveness among U.S. presidents
- Achievement needs are expressed in varying ways among women, depending on the direction they take in their lives
Diagnosticity
*How much they tell about ability
Need for power
- David Winter (1973)
- Motive to have impact on others, to have prestige, to feel strong compared to others
- PSE responses: images of forceful, vigorous action- especially action that evokes strong emotional responses in others
- Responses showing concern about status or position
- People high in need for power seek out positions of authority and influence and surround themselves with symbols of power
- Are concerned about controlling the images they present to others
- Enhance their reputations
- Want others to view them as authoritative and influential
- Narcissistic, absorbed in their importance
- More sexually active
- Less likely to make concessions in diplomatic negotiations
- Better outcomes in negotiations
- When they win, they learn implicitly (outside their awareness) to continue what they had been doing
- When they lose, they learn implicitly not to continue what they had been doing
- Predicts the likelihood of holding executive positions in organizations
- Enhances effectiveness in managing others
- Winter (2010)- what makes the power motive effective in politics is that people high in the power motive aren’t bothered by the lack of control in political situations.
- They just keep adjusting their behavior in a continuing effort to have influence
- Ideal wife is a woman who’s dependent
- Influence the manner in which he or she relates to others
- Taking an active, assertive, controlling orientation in peer interactions
- Are rewarded by low-dominance expressions from others
- Disrrupted by high-dominance expressions
- More angered when others don’t respond well to their efforts to exert influence
- Have more ominous overtones
- Men high in power are more likely to physically abuse their female partners during arguments
- Often leads to success, but sometimes it’s frustrated by failure
- An increase in the stress hormone cortisol after failure
- High need for power relates to both a larger increase in testosterone after a success and a greater reduction in testosterone after failure for men
- High power motivation was related to a higher level of estradio at baseline for women
Power motive a good thing or a bad thing?
*Depending on whether or not the person acquires a sense of responsibility during socialization.
-High in the sense of responsibility-> the motive yields a conscientious pursuit of prestige-> power is expressed in socially accepted
-Low in the sense of responsibility -> problematic ways of influencing others including aggressiveness, sexual exploitation, and alcohol and drug use
*Winter (2007)
The war crises involved higher displays of the power motive but also- paradoxically- higher levels of responsibility
In many circumstances, going to war seems to be the responsible thing to do
Need for affiliation
- Motive to spend time with others and form friendly social ties
- PSE responses: in concern over acceptance by others and by active attempts to establish or maintain positive relations with others.
- Want to be seen as agreeable
- More like to go along when a group exerts pressure
- Get nervous if they think others are judging their interpersonal skills
- Prefer interaction partners who are warm, compaared to those who are reserved
- Make concessions in negotiations
- Initiate contacts and try to establish friendships
- Especially sensitive to angry expressions from others
- Go beyond worrying about acceptance from others
- Active participation in social events
- Sorrentino and Field (1986)
- Were nominated as group leaders more often
- Spend more time engaged in social activities
- When they’re alone, more likely to express the wish to be interacting with others
- If you have a low affiliation need, you’re best off with someone who has a similarly low affiliation need. If your affiliation need is high, you’re best off with someone whose affiliation need is also high.
Need for intimacy
*Dan McAdams (1982, 1985, 1989)
*Desire to experience warm, close, and communicative exchanges with another person, to feel close to another person
*Shares with affiliation motivation a wish to be with others as an end, rather than a means.
*Go beyond the need for affiliation
*Closeness and open sharing with another person
*McAdams- the need for affiliation didn’t focus enough on the positive, affirmative aspects of relationships
-Affiliation- an active, striving, “doing” orientation
-Intimacy- a “being” orientation
*McAdams and Constantian (1983)
-Correlation of affiliation and intimacy= 0.58
-Aren’t fully distinct
*More one-to-one exchanges with other people, though not more large-group interactions
*Involved more self-disclosure
-More likely to share with friends their hopes, fears and fantasies
-Doing more listening- because they are more concerned about their friends’ well-being
-Entail both self-disclosure and partner disclosure
*Define their lives partly in terms of such interactions
*McAdams (1982)
-Autobiographical recollections
-Was strongly correlated with memory content that also implied intimacy
*Laugh, smile, and make more eye contact when conversing
*Don’t try to dominate the social scene
*View group activities as chances for group members to be involved in a communal way
*Desire for intimacy is good for people
-McAdams & Vaillant, 1982- men wrote narrative fantasies at age 30 and were assessed 17 years later
Had higher marital and job satsifaction at 47
-Women- more hapiness and gratification in their lives unless they were living alone
*Don’t seem to coexist well with power needs
*Persons who are high in both needs are often poorly adjusted
Inhibited power motivation (McClelland, 1979)
- Patterns involving several needs at once- combination with other characteristics
- Low need for affiliation with a high need for power, in conjunction with the tendency to inhibit the expression of the latter.
- Leadership
- A person high in need for power wants to influence people
- Being low in need for affiliation lets the person make tough decisions without worrying about being disliked
- Being high in self-control (inhibiting the use of power)-> want to follow orderly procedures and stay within the framework of the organization-> do very well in business
- Managerial success
- 16-year period
- Moved to higher levels of management (McClelland & Boyatzis, 1982)
- Effective at persuasion
- Greater verbal fluency and effective use of nonverbal cues
- Be effective in mobilizing others
- Winter (1993)- conductive to starting wars
- Imagery in the statements of politicians predicted going to war
Incentive
- Degree to which a given action can satisfy a need for you
- Determine how a motive is expressed behaviorally
- They choose ways to satisfy their needs, based on the incentive values that various activities have for them.
- Various situations have different incentive values to different people, even if the situations fulfill the same need.
- People choose for themselves which situations to enter and which to avoid-> interaction between person and situation
- Needs and incentives both influence behavior, but in different ways.
- McClelland (1985)- need strength relates to long-term frequencies of need-relevant actions of any type
- Incentive values should relate to choices within a domain of action
- Needs influence behavior primarily at a nonconscious level, whereas values influence the more conscious process of choice
Implicit motive
- What the PSE measures
- Person may or may not be aware of them
- What we have been calling motives
- More basic
- Recurrent preferences for classes of affective experiences that McClelland believed lie at the heart of motives
- Primitive and automatic
- Good predictors of broad behavioral tendencies over time
