The Effects of Affiliative Motivation and Perspective Taking on Social Tuning

Root, Aaron P.

Student Work

The Effects of Affiliative Motivation and Perspective Taking on Social Tuning

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This study examined the effects of affiliative motivation, or the desire to get along with someone, and perspective taking, or the ability to adopt another person's views, on social tuning. Participants interacted with either a nice or rude experimenter (affiliative motivation manipulation) who was always wearing a pro-homosexuality tshirt. All participants then completed a sentence unscrambling task, and half unscrambled neutral sentences and half unscrambles perspective-taking oriented sentences. Their implicit and explicit attitudes were measured to determine the extent to which they tuned toward the experimenter. Results show that participants who had affiliative motivation were more likely to tune towards the experimenter than those who had low affiliative motivation. -

This report represents the work of one or more WPI undergraduate students submitted to the faculty as evidence of completion of a degree requirement. WPI routinely publishes these reports on its website without editorial or peer review.

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