David Marlowe

The approval motive : studies in evaluative dependence

The authors explore the social-desirability response set--a type of habitual response preference identifiable in personality testing. The intuitive plausibility of this test response distortion led the authors to undertake research to determine if it supported the theory that people describe themselves in favorable terms to obtain the approval of others.

THE APPROVAL MOTIVE, VICARIOUS REINFORCEMENT AND VERBAL CONDITIONING.

This study investigated the relationship of approval motivation to verbal conditioning under vicarious reinforcement. Fifteen college students completed 20 operant trials in a sentence construction task. They then observed E reinforce a “programmed” confederate who emitted critical responses according to a typical acquisition curve. Fifteen control Ss observed identical confederate behavior with the reinforcements omitted. An additional 15 control Ss did not receive the observation phase. All Ss then were given 40 nonreinforced trials. A significant conditioning effect occurred only for Ss with high need for approval in the vicarious reinforcement condition. Results were related to previous verbal conditioning research.