Culture is more than self-reported motives, beliefs, and values: Methodological advancements of measuring implicit motives across cultural contexts

Motivational psychology distinguishes between self-attributed or explicit motives that are part of people’s self-descriptions and implicit motives that are basically unconscious. Implicit motives are shaped first during ontogeny, have far-reaching consequences for feelings and behavior, and are measured by so-called Picture Story Exercises (PSE) in which participants express personal fantasies without any self-reference or restriction to actual life contexts. We will (a) give reasons why implicit measures have incremental value for cross-cultural investigations, (b) document methodological advances in implicit motive research, and (c) include an overview of current developments. We focus on findings documenting the significance of implicit motives for individuals’ behavior and psychological processes from evolutionary, developmental, and cross-cultural perspectives. We conclude that to improve our understanding and predictions of universal and culture-specific aspects of behavior by individuals’ motives within and across cultural groups, we need to supplement our reliance on self-report measures with implicit measures of motives.
Keywords: implicit motives, explicit motives, motive congruence, operant motive test, picture story exercise, thematic content analysis