Preferences among Alternative Test Outcomes: A Classroom Measure of Social Motives
To develop a procedure for determining the dominance of various social motives operative in classroom settings and to provide a didactic method for illustrating social motives, college students were requested to rank their preferences among alternative distributions of own and others' scores on a test covering the content of a course. It was found that outcomes that maximized own scores were pre ferred by a majority of students, but only in that instance where their highest score was slightly better than that obtained by their class mates. Less than a majority of students preferred the same score which maximized their own absolute outcome when it was slightly lower than their classmates' scores. Evidence was found in the preference data for the presence of the social motivational orientations of individualism (own gain maximization), competition (relative gain maximization), cooperation (joint gain maximization), and equity (equality maximization). The verbal rationales provided by students for their preferences were strongly consistent with the motivational properties of preferred own and other outcomes.