Motivation and interpersonal sensitivity: Does it matterhow hard you try?

摘要

Across 11 experiments, motivation to beaccurate on a test of interpersonal sensitivity was manip-ulated using five methods for increasing motivation(monetary incentive, ego motive, forewarning that accu-racy would be tested, exhortation to try hard, and framingthe interpersonal sensitivity test description to suggest thatperformance was gender relevant). Participants were thengiven an interpersonal sensitivity test consisting of inter-preting the meanings of cues or recalling a target person'sappearance, nonverbal cues, or spoken utterances. Neitherthe individual studies, nor a meta-analysis of the 11 studies,found that the motivation manipulations improved partic-ipants' accuracy on interpersonal sensitivity tests thatinvolved the processing of nonverbal cues. However,motivation had a significant positive effect when sensitivitywas defined as recall of verbal cues. There was no evidencethat any of the manipulations had a differential impact onmen and women.