Core Social Motives Research Articles

Are customers naturally attracted to brands? A core social motives scale for measuring brand engagement

PurposeTo extend consumer–brand relationship research to the satisfaction of social needs, we introduce a new construct to assess consumer propensity to develop brand relationships based on the satisfaction of social needs through brands and provide a scale to measure this construct.Design/methodology/approachWe implement a two-stage procedure based on the literature and expert judgments to formulate questions based on questionnaire data, and refinement processes and validation analyses are applied to measure the validity and reliability of the scale.FindingsWe developed a scale for measuring consumer propensity for establishing brand relationships that covers five dimensions: belonging, control, understanding, self-enhancement and trust. The scale was validated and found to be reliable.Research limitations/implicationsThis research could benefit from model testing using samples from outside the USA, thus incorporating the role of culture and considering behavioral outputs.Practical implicationsThe identification and operationalization of the propensity to relate to brands are important in market segmentation for more efficiently deepening brand relationships. Additionally, this conceptualization improves our understanding of the elements that contribute to the relationship between brands and consumers: belonging, control, understanding, self-enhancement and trust.Originality/valueAlthough the consumer–brand relationship is recognized in the literature, the satisfaction of social needs via this relationship has been ignored. This paper aims to enhance our understanding of person–brand relationships by proposing a scheme for analyzing the degree of need satisfaction facilitated by this relationship.

Business manager training and employee support

The world is changing, and with it the way we work and how we relate to our work. Businesses face many challenges to which they must adapt if they hope to remain competitive. In addition to the question of an ecological transition, respect for human rights and working conditions is essential. Today, faced with recruitment difficulties and turnover issues, well-being and the quality of life in the workplace have become priorities for companies that wish to maintain their attractiveness and keep their current employees; in this context, motivation is an essential variable. As such, it is necessary to look into current managerial practices and skills and their underlying factors. In this context, we are interested in the impact of managerial practices on employees. The two principal means of becoming a manager are to be promoted “internally” or recruited externally; these two manager profiles differ in training, professional experience and organizational culture. Stemming from the theoretical field of social psychology, notably the “Five core social motives” model (Fiske, 2003), we reflect upon the issue of managerial practices in the context of a France-based business.

The motivated appeal to hypocrisy: the relation of motivational threats to message rejection

Few studies have focused on the conditions in which individuals perceive hypocrisy in others. The current study introduces and tests the Motivated Appeal to Hypocrisy (MAtH) hypothesis. This hypothesis examines core social psychological motivational threats and asks (a) whether these are related to the accounts of individuals in charging others with hypocrisy, and (b) whether these perceptions of hypocrisy are associated with reductions in the persuasiveness of persons targeted as hypocrites. Study 1 (N=201) was based on qualitative coding of stories and revealed, as expected, that violations of core social motives involving belongingness, understanding, control, self-enhancement, and trust are involved in participants’ stories of hypocrisy. Study 2 (N=237) used a multilevel correlational approach and demonstrated that violations of core social motives significantly predict perceptions of hypocrisy and the rejection of a person’s message or advice. The relation between social motive violations and message rejection was mediated by perceptions of hypocrisy.

Core social motives explain responses to collective action issues

AbstractManaging collective action issues such as pandemics and climate change requires major social and behavioral change. Dominant approaches to addressing these issues center around information provision and financial incentives to shift behavior, yet, these approaches are rarely effective without integrating insights from psychological research on motivation. By accurately characterizing human motives, social scientists can identify when and why individuals engage, and facilitate behavior change and public engagement. Here, we use the core social motives model to sort social psychological theories into five fundamental social motives: to Belong, Understand, Control, self‐Enhance, and Trust. We explain how each motive can improve or worsen collective action issues, and how this framework can be further developed towards a comprehensive social psychological perspective to collective action issues.

Exploring the adaptive role of core social motives in perceived societal threats

Societal threats that face the world today seem overpowering, especially for young generations who will need to develop creative solutions. The present study examined the relationships between societal threats and social motives. Social motives function to orient individuals toward the social world and prepare them to engage socially. This adaptive function of social motives may be particularly useful when threats are looming in the environment. We thus expected that perceived societal threats would correlate positively with activation of social motives, especially among individuals with lower self‐esteem, who tend to show higher interdependency when threatened. Our cross‐cultural samples from Australia, the United States, New Zealand, the Philippines, China (Macao), Malaysia (Sabah), and Austria (N = 1,269) showed evidence to support these expectations. Perceived societal threats correlated positively with all social motives (Belong, Understand, Control, Esteem, and Trust); however, the link was most vital for the Control motive, and especially in the United States and China. In line with our expectations, higher perceived societal threats were associated with more robust social motives, especially among those with low self‐esteem. Potential mechanisms through which social motives assist adaptation to societal threats and country‐specific contents of threats are discussed.

Reducing Objectification Could Tackle Stigma in the COVID-19 Pandemic: Evidence From China.

Stigmatization associated with the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is expected to be a complex issue and to extend into the later phases of the pandemic, which impairs social cohesion and relevant individuals' well-being. Identifying contributing factors and learning their roles in the stigmatization process may help tackle the problem. This study quantitatively assessed the severity of stigmatization against three different groups of people: people from major COVID-19 outbreak sites, those who had been quarantined, and healthcare workers; explored the factors associated with stigmatization within the frameworks of self-categorization theory and core social motives; and proposed solutions to resolve stigma. The cross-sectional online survey was carried out between April 21 and May 7, 2020, using a convenience sample, which yielded 1,388 valid responses. Employing data analysis methods like multivariate linear regression and moderation analysis, this study yields some main findings: (1) those from major COVID-19 outbreak sites received the highest level of stigma; (2) factors most closely associated with stigmatization, in descending order, are objectification and epidemic proximity in an autonomic aspect and fear of contracting COVID-19 in a controllable aspect; and (3) superordinate categorization is a buffering moderator in objectification–stigmatization relationship. These findings are important for further understanding COVID-19-related stigma, and they can be utilized to develop strategies to fight against relevant discrimination and bias. Specifically, reinforcing superordinate categorization by cultivating common in-group identity, such as volunteering and donating for containment of the pandemic, could reduce objectification and, thus, alleviate stigma.

Social motives of university students in seven countries: Measurement development and validation

A new scale to measure core social motives was developed based on the BUC(K)ET framework (Belong, Understand, Control, Esteem, and Trust). The scale was completed by 1,516 university students from seven countries: Australia, the United States, New Zealand, the Philippines, Malaysia, China (Macao), and Austria. Multigroup confirmatory factor analysis supported the scale's full scalar invariance between Australia and the United States and between Australia and Austria. Partial scalar invariance was established for all countries after omitting the Understand motive, suggesting that the remaining four subscales can be used to compare levels of social motives across diverse cultural groups with caution. We further established the scale's construct validity by examining its correlations in the nomological networks involving several individual difference variables. The profile of social motives was remarkably similar across countries and gender groups, although three Asian groups showed higher motives to belong than non‐Asian groups, and women showed generally stronger core social motives than men, especially the Belong motive. Implications and possible directions of research are discussed.

Universal stories: How narratives satisfy core motives

For millennia, narratives have been a primary mode of oral discourse. Narrative presentation of information has been shown to facilitate interpersonal and group communication. However, research indicates that narratives are more than merely an adaptive mode of communication. Narrative is a fundamental – and perhaps foundational – element of social and cultural life. The present article posits that the centrality of narrative in social life is due to narrative’s ability to help satisfy the five core social motives, as identified by Fiske belonging, understanding, control, self-enhancement, and trust. In so doing, this article reviews empirical and theoretical work examining basic narrative processes, autobiographical narratives, and entertainment narrative consumption to illustrate how narrative thought helps to satisfies core human motives and in turn, how the narrative construction process informs self and identity formation.

Affiliation‐seeking among the powerless: Lacking power increases social affiliative motivation

AbstractAlthough it is well known that many people possess fundamental desires for both social affiliation and power, research has only begun to investigate the interplay between these two core social motives. The current research tested the hypothesis that an individual's level of power would influence that person's level of social affiliative motivation. We predicted that, compared with participants in a control condition, (1) individuals who possess power would exhibit less social affiliative motivation; and (2) individuals who lack power would display greater social affiliative motivation. Although we found little evidence to support the former prediction, we observed consistent evidence across two experiments that supported the latter. In Experiment 1, priming participants with low power (versus control) led them to display greater interest in joining a campus service aimed at fostering new friendships among students. In Experiment 2, placing participants in a position of low power (versus control) led them to seek greater proximity to a partner. Together, these results suggest that lacking power motivates people to seek social affiliation. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

What Jurors Want: Motivating Juror Cognition to Increase Comprehension & Improve Decisionmaking

What do jurors want to know? Jury research tells us that jurors want to understand the information they hear in a trial so they can reach the correct decision. But like all people, jurors who are asked to analyze information in a trial — even jurors who consciously want to reach a fair and accurate verdict — are unconsciously influenced by their internal goals and motivations. Some of these motives are specific to individual jurors; for instance, a potential juror with a financial interest in a case would be excluded from the jury pool. But other motivations, like the motive to understand the law and to reach an accurate verdict, are core social motives that influence the cognition of all jurors. Although those motives may be less obvious than those of the juror with a financial stake in the case, they still have a profound influence on how jurors learn the law and interpret evidence, and we can use them to better motivate jurors to efficiently learn the law and to think carefully about how the law will apply to the facts they will see in a trial. A significant body of legal literature has examined jurors’ use and understanding of the substantive law they receive in jury instructions, and many scholars have recommended methods to improve juror comprehension of instructions. This Article is the first law journal article to take that analysis a step further and consider all of the major scientific studies that examine motivated cognition and apply them to jury decisionmaking. Because much of juror cognition is motivated, we can harness the power of this motivated cognition to further increase juror comprehension of the law and improve juror decisionmaking.

Stereotyping, prejudice, and discrimination at the seam between the centuries: evolution, culture, mind, and brain

Social psychologists possess considerable enthusiasm and expertise in the study of stereotyping, prejudice, and discrimination, having commenced in the 1920s and 1930s. Research and theory in the next three to four decades focused on motivation, followed by a reactively exclusive focus on cognition in the 1970s and early 1980s, in turn followed by a 1990s joint focus on cognition and motivation. Throughout, intra-individual conflict analyses have alternated with contextual analyses, though both clearly have merit. Based on a social evolutionary viewpoint, a few core social motives (belonging, understanding, controlling, enhancing, and trusting) account for much current research on interpersonal category-based responses. Trends for the future should entail more emphasis on behavior, more sensitivity to cultural specificities and universals, as well as budding efforts on neural mechanisms of stereotyping, prejudice, and discrimination. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Motivation and Cognition in Social Life: A Social Survival Perspective

Socially motivated perceivers are potentially driven by a wide range of basic human motives, a wider range than so far addressed by theories of motivated social cognition. We suggest that the decidedly social context of our evolutionary past facilitated five core social motives: to belong, to understand, to be effective, to find the world benevolent, and to maintain self-esteem. Survival is facilitated by group membership, and we argue that all five motives facilitate successful belonging. An overview of motives previously proposed by diverse personality theorists reveals a striking consensus with our five motives. The social survival perspective more generally fits existing data and suggests new research directions.