Implicit motives and decision making: mechanism and application

Abstract

The present thesis deals with the human need perspective on decision-making and behavior. Specifically, rooted in Murray’s (1938) concept of needs and its role in personality, the present work addresses the question as to how implicit motives determine specific patterns of preferences and decision-making. Implicit motives are defined as motivational dispositions that operate outside of people’s conscious awareness and are aimed at the attainment of specific classes of incentives (McClelland, Koestner, & Weinberger, 1989; Schultheiss, 2008). These motives are presumed to build on conditioned, or learned, affectrelated experiences during socialization. Research on implicit motives has largely focused on three main needs, namely achievement (i.e., the desire to prosper and gain success), power (i.e., the desire to influence and control others), and affiliation (i.e., the desire for friendly social interactions). Once these motives are developed and established, they orient, select, and energize behavior (McClelland, 1985). Accordingly, implicit motives offer an intriguing and important window to individual’s personalities and their motivation to act in specific ways, even though they might not be able to consciously access and report on their motives or how they operate.Overall, the findings of the series of studies described in this thesis can be summarized as follows: (1) Implicit motives predict the selection of specific actions to the extent that these actions have been learned to produce motive-congruent effects or incentives; (2) Implicit motives are translated into motive-congruent goal-directed actions to the extent that these actions are perceived to be instrumental in attaining motive-congruent incentives and satisfying the need underlying the motive; and (3) These effects mainly showed up for implicit motive measures, and not so much for explicit (self-attributed) motive measures. In conclusion, then, implicit motives seem to represent a deep-rooted motivational character of an agent’s personal history that predict a specific class of behaviors as a result of incentive learning and strategic decision-making, even though the person might not be able to consciously access the motive operating in the social context at hand. As a final note, I wish to stress that each chapter starts with an introduction and ends with a discussion that discusses the findings in the context of the extant literature on implicit motives and tries to address the potential merits and shortcomings of the findings for that literature. Furthermore, the chapters are presented in a specific order aimed at assisting the reader to follow the logic of the arguments and tests that I have performed to learn more about the role of implicit motives in human decision-making and behavior.