Implicit Motives as a Way to Understand Cognitive Processes

Interest in implicit processes is at an all-time high in psychology. Research on individual differences in implicit motivation has been conducted for decades and offers an important conceptual and empirical foundation for the growing interest in cognitive processes outside awareness. In this article, we review the past findings on the influence of implicit motivation on both basic and complex cognitive processes in the stages of attention and encoding as well as rehearsal, organization, and retrieval. Data from narrative essays as well as experimentally controlled studies demonstrate that individual differences in implicit motives have an influence on each step of learning and memory processes. Implicit motives influence the cognitive processing of motive-related information to facilitate desired affective end states. The idea that people have motives and intentions outside their awareness is currently of great interest in psychology (e.g., Bargh & Chartrand, 1999; Gladwell, 2005; Schultheiss, 2008; Woike, 2008). Research on implicit processes is burgeoning. Many new and interesting variants on how motivational factors influence cognitive processes are being discovered. Implicit motives are one form of motivation that plays an important role in the regulation of cognition. Over 50 years ago, implicit motives were identified as personality dispositions that operate outside of conscious awareness; and as orthogonal to selfreported preferences and goals (McClelland, Koestner, & Weinberger, 1989). In personality, researchers (e.g., McClelland, Koestner, & Weinberger, 1989; Woike, 2008) have gathered validity data for the distinction between explicit and implicit motives. Implicit motives are people’s less conscious preferences to experience certain types of affect and are linked to intrinsic incentives (i.e., enjoying an activity for its own sake), and are better able to predict long-term behavioral trends, or cognitive styles. Explicit motives, in contrast, are people’s (conscious) self-attributed goals and values that are activated by extrinsic incentives (i.e., receiving a reward for an activity), and are best suited to predict behavior occurring in well-structured situations that are rich in social incentives and require a cognitive decision on the course of action. These motives are measured through different assessment techniques that estimate their strength at their respective levels of awareness. Implicit motives must be measured indirectly and cannot be cross-validated with self-reported measures of motivation. In this paper, we deal exclusively with the topic of implicit motives, for a review of the differential influence of implicit and explicit motives on cognitive processes, see Woike (2008). The most frequently used method of assessing implicit motives is the Picture Story Exercise (PSE; McClelland, Koestner, & Weinberger, 1989), which requires research participants to write imaginative stories to drawings showing people in ambiguous social situations. The stories are then scored with empirically derived coding systems. Recently, researchers have found that PSE measures of implicit motivation loaded on the same