Implicit Motives: Using Diffusion Modeling to Assess Effects of Motive Frustration on Cognitive Processes

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Veronika Lerche
• Subject Area: General, Cognitive and Mathematical Psychology
• Term: from 2020 to 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 449906590

The three central psychological motives are the achievement, affiliation, and power motive. The frustration of these motives has an important influence on human experience and behavior. The underlying mechanisms have, however, not yet been sufficiently investigated. What is, for example, the effect of negative performance feedback on task processing for individuals with a high achievement motive? How do individuals with a high affiliation motive react to the information that they will have few friends in the future? In this project, a mathematical model — the diffusion model — will be employed to closer examine the effects of such motive frustrations on cognitive processes. In the field of motive research, the application of the DM is novel. In contrast to previous studies that often focused on behavioral variables (mean response times, error rates), the DM uses information about entire response time distributions. Therefore, it becomes possible to separate different cognitive processes. For example, an increase in response speed after negative performance feedback of individuals with a high implicit hope for success can have different causes. Due to increased effort, their information uptake or their motoric response might have accelerated. It is also possible that they become less cautious, i.e., faster at the expense of higher error rates. Such completely different explanations can be disentangled by means of diffusion modeling. We will analyze the effects of frustration of the implicit achievement (subproject 1) and affiliation motive (subproject 2). Thereby, we will examine different variables that can have a significant impact on the cognitive processes following motive frustration (among others, strength of the hope vs. fear component of a motive, passive vs. active fear of failure, task difficulty). In addition, in subproject 3, we investigate another important question from motive research. In the motive literature, mainly two different procedures, the so-called picture story exercises and grid-based measures, are used for the measurement of implicit motives. Grid-based measures have, among others, economic advantages. In the last years, however, the question has been raised whether these procedures really measure implicit motives (like picture story exercises), or rather explicit motives (like self-report measures). In subproject 3, we will take advantage of the data and methods of the previous subprojects to examine this question systematically. By means of a literature review and the analysis of the motive data from the previous subprojects, we will compare the construct and criterion validity of the grid-based measures and the picture story exercises. Further, we will use the procedures of motive frustration from subprojects 1 and 2 to examine the validity of the different motive measures experimentally.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants