Information Processing Account 1 an Information Processing Account of Implicit Motive Arousal

published their groundbreaking monograph " The achievement motive " in 1953, scientific research on human motives such as the needs for achievement, affiliation, or power was off to a great start as a respectable, promising and flourishing branch of psychology. It generated thousands of published research reports over the next three decades and spilled over into other disciplines such as political science, economics, history, or sociology. Roughly at the beginning of the 1980s, however, the former stream of research output had dwindled down to a trickle, and this development was foreshadowed by earlier reviews critical both of the construct validity of motives and their mode of measurement (e. and its variants as being unreliable motive measures turned out to be largely unfounded and based on methodological artifacts (e. not be further reviewed here. Criticisms leveled at the validity of the motive construct in the McClelland-Atkinson tradition, however, may be more difficult to counter and, to the extent that they reflect the frustrations of many researchers who failed to find meaningful relationships between motives and behavior in their studies, may have contributed substantially to the demise of motive research. For instance, Klinger (1966) noted in a review of studies focusing on achievement motivation that while roughly half of the then published studies obtained significant and meaningful relationships between the achievement motive and performance measures, the other half failed to obtain such relationships. This state of affairs led Klinger to question whether TAT-based achievement motive measures actually measure anything motivational at all. Lazarus (1961) summarized research showing either no or paradoxical relationships between the achievement motive and behavior. Taking an essentially Freudian stance, he concluded that the achievement motive is expressed in primary process-like fantasy (i.e., in TAT stories) only to the extent that it is blocked from behavioral manifestations or not filtered away by ego defenses when it is too strongly aroused. According to this point of view, Information processing account 2 one should not expect to be able to predict performance and behavior from a TAT measure of the achievement motives (or any other motive) in any direct and straightforward way. In the present chapter, I will argue that, contrary to the views of Klinger and Lazarus, motives do have a direct, motivating effect on behavior, and that this effect depends on the type of incentive present in a given situation. My main claim will be that motives are aroused …