Woman are more affiliation-motivated than men
In a study to be published in the Journal for Research on Personality, HuMAN Lab researchers Amely Drescher and Oliver Schultheiss found that women and men differ in their nonconscious need for affiliation, but not in their nonconscious needs for power or achievement. The authors used meta-analysis to arrive at these findings, which means that they averaged gender differences for motive measures across published and unpublished studies. Thus, their findings are based on a research synthesis of 28 studies with a total of almost 6,000 research participants and spanning more than 50 years. The observed gender difference between women and men in affiliation motivation is almost half a standard deviation. This means that the average woman scores higher than 70% of men in terms of her need for affiliation
At first blush, the result of higher affiliation motivation in women appears to reflect a gender stereotype at work that prescribes more feminine, "soft" traits for women. However, in their paper Drescher and Schultheiss point out that the truth behind their finding may be more complicated. First, they obtained their results looking at motivation measures that do not rely on self-report and instead tap nonconscious, implicit motivational needs. Thus, the affiliation gender difference is not simply a matter of verbal self-categorization, but appears to reflect something deeper. Second, women were not less power- or achievement-motivated than men and therefore did not follow traditional gender stereotypes in these domains. The authors speculate that hormonal factors may contribute to the gender difference in affiliation motivation, because some studies show that women who do not take oral contraceptives are much more similar to men in their need for affiliation than women who take the pill.
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