Motive perception at first impressions: On the relevance of targets’ explicit and implicit motive dispositions

When people judge the motive dispositions of unacquainted others, are their judgments accurate representations of the targets’ explicit motives, their implicit motives, or both? To address this question, we assessed target persons’ explicit motives via self-report and their implicit motives via a Picture Story Exercise as well as two recently developed affective contingency-based measures. Targets were then filmed during a short, casual conversation. The recordings were shown to thirty unacquainted observers who judged targets’ affiliation, power and achievement motives. For all three motives, observer ratings were linked to explicit motives. For the affiliation and achievement domains, ratings were also linked to implicit motives. We further investigated whether the extent of congruence between observer ratings and motive ratings would depend on information modality, this was not the case. The findings thus indicate that both explicit and implicit motives are relevant for observer judgments, but that these effects are not modality-specific.