Running head: IMPLICIT POWER MOTIVATION A Biobehavioral Model of Implicit Power Motivation Arousal, Reward and Frustration

Like members of many other social species, humans show marked individual differences in how much they seek and enjoy power. Some people are driven to become socially visible and dominate their fellow human beings, while others do not seem to care much for any kind of self-assertion and feel comfortable keeping a low social profile. Such individual differences in the drive for power have been conceptualized and studied over the past 50 years through the prism of the power motive construct. The power motive (also sometimes labeled need Power, or n Power) represents an enduring affective preference for having impact on other people or the world at large (Winter, 1973). Individuals with a strong power motive experience the consummation of the impact incentive as pleasurable and rewarding, whereas individuals with a weak power motive do not derive much pleasure from having impact. Accordingly, the former are more motivated than the latter to seek out opportunities to have impact on others. From the start, research on the power motive was guided by the notion that introspective access to motivational states and traits is limited and that motives should therefore be assessed indirectly – hence the attribute implicit (McClelland, 1984). In their groundbreaking research on the achievement motive, David McClelland and John Atkinson had shown that experimentally aroused motivational states alter the content of stories that individuals write about picture cues in specific ways that can be codified into reliable scoring systems 1953). The McClelland-Atkinson approach was first applied towards the development of a measure of implicit power motivation by Veroff (1957), who compared the stories written by candidates in student elections with stories written by students not running for office, and later by Uleman (1972), who devised a scoring system by comparing stories written by students who acted as powerful Implicit power motivation 3 experimenters with those written by students assigned to the less powerful role of research participant. Winter (1973) conducted additional studies employing experimental arousal of power motivation and cross-validated and combined the content coding categories he had derived in his research with those identified earlier by Veroff and Uleman. According to Winter's integrated scoring system, power imagery is scored whenever a story character expresses a power concern through strong forceful actions, provides unsolicited help, support or advice, tries to control or regulate others' behavior, tries to influence, persuade, bribe, or argue with another person, tries to impress another …