Are Implicit Motives “Visible” to Well-Acquainted Others?

Abstract

In this study, we compared self-ratings and informant ratings of personality as predictors of implicit motives, need for achievement (nAch), and need for affiliation (nAff). A total of 120 participants wrote creative stories to 5 images from the Picture Story Exercise (Smith, 1992) and completed the Revised NEO Personality Inventory (Costa & McCrae, 1992). Three well-acquainted informants rated each participant's personality with the Big Five Inventory (John & Srivastava, 1999) and Saucier's (1994) Mini-Markers. Consistent with the study hypotheses, peer ratings of Conscientiousness significantly predicted nAch scores after controlling for word count and self-rated Conscientiousness. Contrary to hypotheses, peer ratings and self-ratings in all 5 domains did not significantly predict nAff scores. The findings are considered in the interest of bridging the gap between trait and motive concepts in personality assessment.

Acknowledgments

John Phebus is now at the National Board of Medical Examiners, Philadelphia, PA. We are grateful to Lewis Goldberg of the Oregon Research Institute for his generosity in granting access to the data from the Eugene-Springfield Community Study and to Maureen Barckley for her patient assistance with coordinating the transmission of those data.

Notes

¹We appreciate the input of an anonymous reviewer who brought these studies to our attention.

∗p <.05.

∗p <.05.

²We explored the relationships between implicit motives and self-rated FFM traits in this data by examining the correlations between nAch, nAff, and all 30 NEO–PI–R facet scales. The strongest correlate of nAff was the Extraversion facet of warmth (r = .27, p <.01). The nAff scores were also positively correlated with the Agreeableness facet of straightforwardness (r = .21, p <.05) and the Neuroticism facets of impulsiveness (r = .26, p <.01) and self-consciousness (r = .20, p <.05). The highest correlates of nAch were the Agreeableness facets of compliance (r = .25, p <.01) and straightforwardness (r = .25, p <.01). nAch was also related to lower scores on the Neuroticism facets of angry hostility (r = −.24, p <.05), anxiety (r = −.22, p <.05), and self-consciousness (r = −.20, p <.05). Regrettably, this more specific level of trait analysis was not possible with the BFI and Mini-Marker scales used by the informants. The relationships between implicit motives and self-rated Big Five facets were not significant when using an omnibus test of significance to control for Type I errors. Two omnibus analyses were run using the 30 self-rated NEO–PI–R facets as predictors of nAch in the first test and nAff in the second; neither test reached significance, R ² = .29, F(30, 89) = 1.23, p = .23 and R ² = .33, F(30, 89) = 1.45, p = .09, respectively. A multistage alpha correction procedure (Larzelere & Mulaik, 1977) yielded the same nonsignificant results.