What Motives Do People Most Want to Know About When Meeting Another Person?

You’re on a first date and you ask your date, “What do you want most in life?” What exactly are you hoping to learn about this person? After all, people are motivated by all sorts of things—like avoiding danger, obtaining a good job, finding a loving partner, and caring for their family. If you could pick one motive to find out about, which one would it be? And why?

These kinds of questions—What motives do people most want to know about when meeting another person, and why are they so keen to know about those motives?—are the subject of our recent research.

People Really Care About Caregiving Motives

We asked people to imagine that they were about to meet someone whom they didn’t know anything about and to indicate their interest in obtaining information about that person’s motives. We focused on seven motives that are known to be important for social interactions:

• Protecting oneself from danger
• Avoiding disease
• Affiliating with others
• Achieving high status
• Finding new romantic partners
• Maintaining a long-lasting romantic relationship
• Attending to the needs of family members

People definitely prioritized some of these more than others. The motive that people most wanted to know about was caring for family members, with maintaining a long-lasting romantic relationship as a close second. This was generally true regardless of participants’ own personality traits, their age, gender, or whether they had children of their own.

People Care About Caregiving Motives Across Many Circumstances

But there is a difference between simply meeting a “person” and meeting someone on a blind date. And meeting someone on a date is different than meeting a new co-worker, or encountering a stranger while walking alone in a dark alley at night. Might people seek information about different motives in these different kinds of contexts?

To find out, we checked out 11 additional circumstances in which people might meet someone—for example, meeting potential new romantic interests, meeting new co-workers, and encountering strangers in dark alleys.

Not surprisingly, we found that people did have different information-seeking priorities in different circumstances. When meeting someone for a casual sexual encounter, for instance, people expressed a higher-than-usual interest in knowing that person’s motivation to avoid disease. When meeting a new co-worker, people had a higher-than-usual interest in knowing that person’s motivation to achieve high status. And when encountering a stranger in a dark alley, people had a higher-than-usual interest in knowing that stranger’s motivation to protect themselves from danger.

But the most striking result was that interest in knowing someone’s caregiving motivation was not affected much at all by these different contexts. Across the different circumstances, people still most highly prioritized learning about someone’s motivation to attend to the needs of family members. This was the case even in contexts that had no obvious relevance to family, such as meeting a new co-worker, or encountering a stranger while walking alone in a dark alley. In short, across a wide range of contexts, people care about other people’s motivation to care.

Someone’s Motivation To Care Conveys Other Important Information Too

Why would caregiving rank so high in people’s values? Why are people so especially keen to know if someone else is, or isn’t, motivated to attend to their family members’ needs? The answer might come if you think of people you know who actually are strongly motivated to care for their family. They are probably also generally warm-hearted, trustworthy, competent, and dependable—behavioral traits that influence interpersonal interactions across a wide range of circumstances. Perhaps one reason why people are so especially keen to know about someone’s motivation to care for their family is because this caregiving motive is most informative about these kinds of personality traits.

We explored this possibility in a follow-up study. We asked participants to rate how much they believed they could learn about a person’s personality traits based on just one piece of information about that person’s motives. We found that people perceived the caregiving motive (along with the relationship maintenance motive) to be especially indicative of someone’s warmth, trustworthiness, competence, and dependability. These particular traits—which, collectively, tell us something about someone’s moral character—matter, and they matter regardless of whether you’re encountering that person in a dark alley, or at work, or on a date.

For Further Reading

Billet, M. I., McCall, H. C., & Schaller, M. (2022). What motives do people most want to know about when meeting another person? An investigation into prioritization of information about seven fundamental motives. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. https://doi.org/10.1177/01461672211069468

Ko, A., Pick, C. M., Kwon, J. Y., Barlev, M., Krems, J. A., Varnum, M. E. W., Neel, R., Peysha, M., Boonyasiriwat, W., Brandstätter, E., Crispim, A. C., Cruz, J. E., David, D., David, O. A., de Felipe, R. P., Fetvadjiev, V. H., Fischer, R., Galdi, S., Galindo, O., . . . Kenrick, D. T. (2020). Family matters: Rethinking the psychology of human social motivation. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 15(1), 173–201. https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691619872986
 

Matthew I. Billet is a PhD student in Social/Personality Psychology at the University of British Columbia. His research focuses on moral and religious cognition in environmental decision-making.

Mark Schaller is a Professor of Psychology at the University of British Columbia. His research focuses on human motivational systems and their implications for social cognition and social interaction.