Parsing social motivation: development and validation of a self-report measure of social effort

Abstract

Background

Reduced efforts to form and maintain social bonds can exist in the context of a sufficient desire for social connection. Thus, social impairment common across many psychiatric conditions may often reflect failures in social effort exertion, despite normative levels of social liking and wanting. Although there are many questionnaires available that assess sociability, desire, or lack thereof for connection and perceived social support, there is no current self-report assessment of the behavioral outputs of social motivation.

Aims

We aimed to develop and validate a measure of the social effort in college students and the general population.

Methods

College students (n = 981) and a broader sample of adults via Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (MTurk; n = 506) participated in the study.

Results

We identified two factors that represented content related to general social effort and social effort in adherence with social norms; we named the measure the Social Effort and Conscientiousness Scale (SEACS). Results suggest the SEACS is a reliable and valid measure of social effort.

Conclusions

Lower scores on the SEACS were associated with symptoms of depression and anxiety, highlighting the scale’s potential utility in clinical populations. We include a discussion of possible applications of the SEACS, including its further use and application in psychopathology research.

Keywords:

• Social motivation
• effort
• conscientiousness
• exploratory structural equation modeling
• scale development

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 We initially included a set of items reflecting tendencies toward social avoidance as an additional check for discriminant validity. Because these items did not discriminate well from other related constructs (e.g., extraversion), and are well-captured in existing scales, we chose to omit them from the scale.