Properties of Motive-specific Incentives

Overview Over the past 50 years, motivation theorists have generally agreed that implicit motives represent capacities to experience specific classes of incentives as rewarding Achievement) find pleasure in mastering challenging tasks; individuals high in the need for power (n Power) get a kick out of having impact on others; and individuals high in the need for affiliation (n Affiliation) enjoy having close, harmonious contact with others. An important consequence of implicit motives' capacity to affectively charge incentives is that they orient attention and energize and select behaviors aimed at attaining these incentives (McClelland, 1987). 2 However, despite the nominal importance theorists have ascribed to motive-specific incentives, their exact properties have remained strangely undefined in the past. We believe that this state of affairs has hindered theoretical and empirical advances in the field because a key ingredient for a more thorough understanding of motives, what they are and how they operate, has been missing. This has led to a somewhat insular existence of motive research outside of mainstream personality psychology, social psychology, and biopsychology, the three disciplines traditionally most concerned with motivation. At the same time, the relative lack of precision inherent in the definitions of motives and particularly their incentives has led to a Babylonic proliferation of motive measures and theories that often do not share much except the name with the original concepts and measures developed by McClelland and colleagues (see McClelland, Koestner, & Weinberger, 1989, for a discussion of this issue). Neither development was apt to move research on implicit motives forward in great and confident strides. As deplorable as this outcome may be, we suggest it can be revised to a large extent by going back to the incentive concept at the core of implicit motive research and defining and testing it rigorously. In the present chapter, we aim to move in this direction by tracing in the first half the conceptualization of motive-specific incentives from their origin in McClelland, Atkinson, Clark and Lowell's (1953) pioneering work on the achievement motive through its metamorphoses in the work of McClelland and his associates (McClelland, 1980; McClelland et al., 1989) to the information-processing account of implicit motivation formulated by Schultheiss (2001, 2008). In the second half of the chapter, we will present a motivational field theory of motivational incentives, proposing that nonverbal social signals, specifically facial expressions of emotion, function as incentives for implicit motives. We will argue that …