Motive Perception at First Impressions: On the Relevance of Targets’ Explicit and Implicit Motive Dispositions

To a greater extent than other animals, humans are able to understand others’ desires, which enables them to form alliances and adjust their own behavior to their interaction partners (Tomasello, 2019). But how far does this capacity go? In many life domains, people seek to estimate the motive dispositions of unacquainted others. For example, an employer might want to find out about the applicant's achievement motive and a person on a first date might care a great deal about how affiliation- or power-oriented their dating partner is. Studies have shown above-chance levels of accuracy when people judge strangers’ intelligence (Reynolds & Gifford, 2001) or personality traits (Borkenau & Liebler, 1992). But how accurate are people at estimating the motive dispositions of strangers?

Motives dispositions describe the recurrent aspiration toward specific classes of incentives; they guide the selection, orientation, and execution of incentive-oriented behavior (McClelland, 1980). Most research focuses on the desires to initiate and maintain positive social relationships (affiliation motive), to influence and lead others (power motive), and to reach or excel one’s personal standards (achievement motive). In a recent study, Wallace and Biesanz (2021) studied the accuracy of motive perception and found that observers can judge newly met targets’ motive profiles with above chance level accuracy when a composite score averaging across motive self- and informant-reports was used as a benchmark criterion. What is unknown to date, however, is to what extent observer evaluations might also be affected by implicit aspects of motive dispositions.

Whereas explicit motives describe conscious representations of motive dispositions and can be assessed via self-report questionnaires, implicit motives represent aspects of motive dispositions that lie beyond people’s explicit motive self-concepts (McClelland et al., 1989; Schultheiss et al., 2008). Traditionally, implicit motives are assessed with the Picture Story Exercise (PSE), a projective test requiring participants to write fictitious stories based on ambiguous pictorial cues that are then content-coded (Schultheiss & Pang, 2007). Even though the PSE is the most popular measure of implicit motives, it has been criticized on psychometric grounds (Entwisle, 1972; but see Lang, 2014).

An alternative, recently developed approach (Dufner et al., 2015, 2018) taps more directly into motive-specific positive affective contingencies (PACs). In the broader literature, the label “implicit” is sometimes used to refer to individuals’ tendency to systematically respond with spontaneous, physiologically-based affect to specific classes of objects (e.g., Lee et al., 2018). In implicit motive theory, it is assumed that people respond with spontaneous positive affect to motive-specific incentives, such as for example, social inclusion in the case of the affiliation motive (McClelland et al., 1989). Accordingly, the PAC approach works by presenting participants pictures of positive motive-specific incentives and assessing their positive affective reactions, either by having them rate their affective experience (Dufner et al., 2018) or by directly measuring facial muscular activity that is indicative of subtle smiling via EMG (Dufner et al., 2015, 2018). Both rating-based and EMG-based PAC measures overlapped only weakly with PSE scores in past research, but predicted motive-relevant outcomes beyond both PSE scores and explicit motive self-reports (Dufner et al., 2015, 2018). This pattern questions the conventional idea that what lies beyond explicit motive self-reports is a unitary implicit motive construct that can only be assessed via operant measures, such as the PSE. Instead, motive-specific PACs appear to tap into implicit aspects of motive dispositions, but ones that are distinct from what the PSE measures.

What does the pathway linking motive dispositions to observer-evaluations look like? According to Funder’s (1995) realistic accuracy model, observers can correctly infer a target’s personality if all of the following conditions are met: The situational context must be trait-relevant, so that the investigated disposition produces a behavioral effect, the behavioral cues must be available to the observers, and they must be detected and correctly utilized by them. With regard to trait relevance, the model implies that both explicit and implicit motives can only affect observer judgements if they are aroused, which typically happens through verbal and nonverbal stimuli respectively (Schultheiss & Köllner, 2021). Regarding availability, the model implies that explicit and implicit motives should affect observer judgments to the extent that the behavioral cues that originate from them are available for the observers.

According to the dual lens model (Hirschmüller et al., 2013), explicit dispositions give rise to controlled behavior and implicit dispositions to spontaneous behavior, and many findings from the motive literature stand in line with these proposals (e.g., Fodor et al., 2010; McAdams et al., 1984). Importantly for the current context, in a study by Hagemeyer et al. (2016), the explicit affiliation motive has been linked to verbal behavior and the implicit motive to nonverbal behavior (Hagemeyer et al., 2016). Given that nonverbal behavior is typically more automatic than verbal behavior (Lakin, 2006), these results also match the dual lens model. The findings also indicate that when the cues that are available for observers are manipulated, this should have an impact on how strongly explicit and implicit motives are linked to observer judgments. When only verbal cues are available, the links should be especially strong for explicit motives and when only nonverbal cues are available, they should be stronger for implicit motives.

In the present research, we tested the hypothesis that at first impressions, motive observer evaluations are linked to targets’ explicit and implicit motives, when visual and auditory information is available. We further hypothesized that the relations between explicit motives and observer judgments are stronger when only auditory information is provided than when only visual information is provided. Conversely, we predicted that the relations between implicit motives and observer judgments are stronger when only visual information is provided than when only auditory information is provided.

Method

The hypotheses and analyses have not been pre-registered and are thus to be regarded as exploratory. The data and code necessary to reproduce the results are provided in the Supplementary Materials.

Results

As in previous research, internal consistencies and retest correlations were high for motive self-reports and rather low for the PSE (see Table 1). Reliabilities were higher for the affective contingency-based measures, with the exception of the power measures (especially the PAC_EMG scale). The measures of explicit motives were positively correlated with each other within each motive domain. Thus, to increase the comprehensiveness and reliability of the explicit motive scores, we computed composite scores across the self-report scales for each motive. We will focus on these composite scores in the interpretation of the results. For the measures of implicit motives, there were positive correlations within the respective motive-domains for the two affective contingency-based measures, but correlations between the PSE and the affective contingency-based measures were inconsistent. As in previous research, there were no correlations that would be considered large according to standard conventions between measures of explicit and implicit motives (even though some of these correlations were statistically significant in the affiliation domain).

Descriptive statistics, reliabilities and intercorrelations for the motive observer ratings are shown in Table 2. Observer ratings of any given motive were typically consistent across modality conditions (mean intra-motive correlations: affiliation r = .67; power r = .53; achievement r = .47). Furthermore, negative correlations were present between the affiliation and power motive ratings within and between most modalities (mean r = -.29), and positive correlations were present between the power and achievement motive ratings (mean r = .24).

We first considered the findings from the audio-visual condition, which was the relevant condition with regard to our general research question of whether motives can be inferred by outside observers when visual and auditory information is available (as is typically the case in naturalistic settings). Correlations between target motive scores and observer judgments are presented in Table 3 (see Table S2 of the Supplementary Materials for an extended version of this table). Within each motive domain, the explicit motives composite scores correlated significantly with the respective observer ratings. Concerning the measures of implicit motives, the expected correlations with observer ratings were present for the PSE assessment of the achievement motive and for the PAC_rat and PAC_EMG assessments of the affiliation and achievement motives. Thus, observer ratings were linked to measures of explicit motives in all three motive domains, and to measures of implicit motives in two out of three domains (affiliation and achievement). For completeness, accuracy correlations for a single observer (which are necessarily smaller, because ratings made by single observers are less reliable than aggregated ratings made by several observers) can be found in Table S3 of the Supplementary Materials.

We also investigated these results when adjusting for multiple testing. We applied the Benjamini-Hochberg (Benjamini & Hochberg, 1995) correction based on the 12 correlations that were relevant for testing our core research question (i.e., correlations between the explicit motives composite and measures of implicit motives with aggregated motive observer evaluations in each motive domain). Out of the eight correlations that were originally significant, six remained so (i.e., those for achievement-specific PSE and PAC_EMG scores measures turned non-significant).

We next examined how measures of explicit versus implicit motives were uniquely linked to observer ratings. For each of the originally significant zero-order correlations between the explicit motives composite scores and observer ratings, we tested whether it holds once the measures of implicit motives were controlled for. Conversely, for each measure of implicit motive, we tested whether its correlation with observer ratings held when the composite measure of explicit motives was controlled for. The partial correlations of the explicit motives scores controlling for the implicit measures were significant for the achievement (r = .25, p = .006) and power (r = .36, p < .001) motives, but it was non-significant for the affiliation motive (r = .09, p = .336). When controlling for explicit measures, the partial correlation between measures of implicit motives and observer ratings remained significant for PAC_EMG affiliation (r = .21, p = .025) and achievement motive domains (r = .18, p = .050). Partial correlations dropped to marginal significance for PAC_rat affiliation (r = .17, p = .070), PAC_rat achievement (r = .17, p =.062,) and PSE achievement (r = .18, p = .054) motives.

Next, we examined the effects in the modality-specific conditions. Descriptively, correlations were weaker in both modality-specific conditions than in the audio-visual condition, which would be expected given that fewer cues were available. But were the correlations for the explicit motives larger when only auditory information was provided than when only visual information was provided? And was the reverse true for the measures of implicit motives?

The overall pattern of results did not match with these hypotheses (see Table 3). For the explicit motive composite scores, correlations for the affiliation and achievement motives were descriptively more positive in the auditory condition than in the visual condition, but not significantly so (affiliation: z = -1.16, p = .127; achievement: z = -1.57, p = .059). For PAC_rat affiliation, the correlation was descriptively more positive in the visual condition than in the auditory condition, but again this difference was not significant (z = .45, p = .327). Thus, there was no evidence for the hypothesis that observer motive ratings overlap with implicit motives to a greater extent when based on visual instead of auditory cues, or that observer ratings overlap with explicit motives to a greater extent when based on auditory instead of visual cues.

Discussion

Previous research on person perception has indicated that even at first sight, strangers are able to rate important aspects of another person’s personality with some degree of accuracy. The current research indicates that this is also the case for motive judgments. For all three motives, observer ratings were linked to at least one motive measure. Whereas most traditional person perception research predicted observer judgments exclusively with personality self- (or peer-)reports, the current findings indicate that in the case of motive judgments, when auditory as well as visual cues are available, observer judgments picked up on both explicit and implicit motive dispositions. When we corrected for multiple testing, most effects remained significant. The magnitude of the effect sizes was comparable to the ones reported for stranger ratings of the Big Five (Connelly & Ones, 2010). In several cases, measures of explicit and implicit motives predicted the observer ratings independently from each other, which is consistent with previous findings showing that explicit and implicit personality aspects can have incremental effects on person perception at low acquaintance (Hirschmüller et al., 2013).

Measures of explicit motives predicted observer ratings in all three motive domains, which means that unacquainted observers’ judgments correspond to some extent with people’s self-views with regard to their motives. These results match well with previous accuracy research based on motive self-reports (Wallace & Biesanz, 2021). For the measures of implicit motives, we found significant positive associations of the PAC scales with observer judgments in two out of the three domains (i.e., affiliation and achievement) and in one domain for the PSE (achievement). It thus appears that for these two motive domains implicit motives give rise to behavior that is visible to and inferable for others, which would indicate that other people are able to detect and interpret behavior that target persons themselves often might not even be aware of (Hofmann et al., 2009). When looking at the different measures of implicit motives separately, we found more consistent links to observer judgments for the PAC measures than for the PSE. Thus, observers seem to rely largely on the social behaviors correlating with motive-specific affective contingencies when they make their judgment about a target’s motives.

However, in the power domain none of the three measures of implicit motives predicted observer judgments. For the affective contingency-based measures, the null correlations might be due to their poor psychometric performance. The reliabilities of the PAC scales were considerably lower in the power domain than in the other two domains (and for the PAC_EMG scale, the values were very low in absolute terms). For the PSE, the null effect is more puzzling, especially as previous research has reported a positive link between PSE assessments of the power motive and persuasiveness judgments by unacquainted observers in a similar setting (Schultheiss & Brunstein, 2002). Possibly, the relatively informal and friendly experimental situation was not well suited for activating the implicit power motive. In the terminology of the realistic accuracy model, relevance might have been low for power. Alternatively, it is possible that the experimental situation did arouse the power motive, but not so much its dominance and control aspects, but rather the need to impress others and gain prestige (Fodor et al., 2010), which was not well captured by our observer ratings.

With regard to the modality-specific effects, we found no evidence for our hypotheses that explicit motives can be inferred more accurately when only auditory (vs. visual) information is presented and that implicit motives can be inferred more accurately when only visual (vs. auditory) information is presented. A potential explanation for these null results is that the assumption that verbal behavior is controlled behavior whereas nonverbal is spontaneous might be too simplistic. Deliberative smiling, for example, is a non-verbal behavior that can be part of an intentional self-presentation tactic (DePaulo, 1992).

The findings from the audio-visual condition provide further evidence that affective contingency-based measures are largely independent of both self-reports and PSE scores and nevertheless predict important motive-specific outcomes. This pattern of results again indicates that the traditional view claiming that what lies beyond explicit self-views is a unitary implicit motive system that can be best captured via the PSE might be too simplistic. Instead, the results indicate that there might be several aspects of implicit motives that operate partly independently from each other (for similar findings in other content domains, see Banse et al., 2013, and Bosson et al., 2000). Accordingly, also measures working with questionnaire items (and which would therefore traditionally be classified as assessing “respondent” behavior), such as the PAC_rat scales might potentially be used to tap into some of these aspects.

There are several limitations and suggestions for future research. Our hypotheses were not pre-registered and a fairly large number of correlations were investigated, which means that readers should focus not so much on individual correlations, but more on the overall pattern of results. Furthermore, our target person and observer samples consisted exclusively of university students. It is possible that due to their interests and training, psychology students might be particularly good at judging a stranger’s personality and that effect sizes would be lower in other populations. Also, the fact that observers were also almost exclusively female might have inflated accuracy correlations (Klein & Hodges, 2001). Regarding the comparability of the observer ratings and the motive ratings, it should be noted that the observers rated the general motive dispositions of the target persons and thus did not make a distinction between implicit and explicit motives. Future research might explore whether observers can differentially infer targets’ self-view with regard to their own motivations (explicit motives) versus their unconscious, affectively charged motivations (implicit motives). In doing so, future research should assess observer ratings with multiple item measures so that their reliabilities can be estimated (the same is true for the PAC_rat scales, which assessed positive affect with only a single item in the current study). Another interesting task for future research would be to assess observers’ intuitive judgments about targets’ motives, for example by having them make these judgments under conditions of distraction. According to the dual lens model, such judgments should be more strongly influenced by implicit motives (Hirschmüller et al., 2013).