Current Status of the Motive Concept

Abstract

The period from 1968 until the early 1980s was not a prosperous one for personality psychology. There was growing disenchantment with the traditional individual differences paradigm and with the apparent lack of theoretical progress being made in the field. Authors of the Annual Review chapters on personality regularly bemoaned the state of the field. Apparently feeling a seven-year itch, the most trenchant critiques appeared at septimal intervals (Adelson, 1969; Rorer & Widiger, 1983; Sechrest, 1976). The major reason for the dissatisfaction was the failure of trait measures to predict specific behaviors and the failure of trait indicators to correlate appreciably with each other. The most popular solution to the behavioral consistency controversy, the person X—situation interaction approach, was misguided from the start. Personologists since the time of Allport argued that situations and persons are not independent of each other, that people seek out and avoid situations on the basis of their psychological propensities. This has now been demonstrated in several empirical studies (Diener et al., 1984; Emmons & Diener, 1986; Emmons et al.,1986; Snyder & Ickes, 1985). Clearly it makes no sense to partition variance to persons and situations when those situations are to a great degree a function of the individuals who inhabit them. Furthermore, it has been proposed that stability and consistency in personality may be due in large part to the selection, evocation, and manipulation of environments congruent with the self (Buss, 1987; Emmons & Diener, 1986).