The Measurement of Implicit Motives in Three Cultures

This article examines methodological issues related to the measurement of implicit motives in culturally divergent samples. Implicit motives are seen as basic needs shared by all human beings. However, crosscultural comparisons are very restricted because many cross-cultural studies on implicit motives with non-Western cultures developed and discussed culture-inherent stimuli. The aim of the study here was to search for a culture-independent set of picture stimuli measuring two basic motives (affiliation and power motive) in three different cultures. Two pretests and one main study were carried out in Cameroon, Costa Rica, and Germany with student and nonstudent samples, respectively, and an extended methodological cross-cultural analysiswas conducted. Construct bias, method bias, and item bias that threaten the cross-cultural comparability of findings were addressed. In analyses, unbiased culture-independent sets of picture stimuli were identified that can be used for cross-cultural comparisons of these two implicit motives.