Motives for Affiliation: Definition, Necessity and Meaning

2024 Author: Miguel Ramacey | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 06:11

To understand the motives of affiliation, you should first define this concept. In psychology, affiliation is the need for an individual to constantly be in society, to build warm and trusting relationships with other people. A person strives for friendship, love and other close relationships.

Basic of Affiliation

The formation of the need for communication and love is based on the initial impact of the child with parents and relatives, and later with peers. A failure in the formation of affiliation occurs when exposed to negative external factors, such as anxiety, self-doubt, doubts, and so on. And only communication with loved ones helps to get rid of feelings of anxiety. The formation of the affiliation motive is an important stage in the development of personal characteristics.

What's the point?

The motive of affiliation in psychology is the impulses and actions aimed at establishing new and ending old relationships between people. An individual canhave excellent communication skills that enable him to make new acquaintances and establish informal relationships without problems. But despite this, a person may experience fear of misunderstanding, failure or rejection. That is why a person feels the need to create not one-time acquaintances, but full-fledged, long-term, close relationships. Affiliation develops over time into human traits.

Motives of affiliation acquire their significance in the process of building communications. Internally, a person experiences affection, loy alty, externally this is manifested in the desire to build cooperation, friendships, the desire to constantly be close to another individual. The concept of affiliation, the motives of affiliation and loneliness are interconnected definitions.

Higher affiliate motivations

Love for another individual is the highest manifestation of affiliation motives. This category is due to ease in communication, confidence in their actions and words, courage, sincerity and openness. Affiliation motives are closely related to the basic need of a person to receive the approval of society, the desire to assert themselves and realize themselves. Psychologists note that people with an increased need for communication usually evoke positive emotions and sympathy from others, because relationships with them are of a trusting nature. In contrast to affiliation, there is a motive of rejection. This category manifests itself in the fear of being misunderstood, not accepted by the most important people for a person. If this one dominatesmotive, then the character of a person is replete with such traits as uncertainty, isolation, constraint.

Features of manifestation of the motives of affiliation and power differ from the motive of achievement and anxiety primarily by their social nature. That is why a person can satisfy affiliation motives through interaction with others.

Etymology of the word

The concept of affiliation is of English origin and means "attach" in translation. We can distinguish the following needs that regulate this concept:

• friendship;
• affection;
• joy of communication and interaction with other people;
• love;
• activities within certain groups of society.

Based on the above categories, the motive of belonging is much broader than just the motive of communication. Many scientists have noted that the need for communication is based on other needs that began to function earlier. At the heart of communicative needs lies the need for new emotions and impressions. M. I. Lisina noted that the motives of affiliation are secondary, it is only a tool to satisfy the most important cognitive need. That is why the motive of belonging is a complex concept that includes many categories.

Specific motives

Despite the fact that the motives of affiliation are considered mainly from a positive perspective, however, the goals can be strikingly different. For example, they can be based on desireto impress people in order to seize power.

The basis of the motive of affiliation is partnership, there is no place for an asymmetric division of roles. This category does not suggest the use of a partner for personal purposes, and on the contrary, such a relationship destroys affiliation. For the most favorable development of affiliate relations, it is necessary to take into account the opinions of both partners, they must feel their own value. Features of the affiliation motive and its interaction with other motives are of paramount importance for building communications.

Affiliation Goals

The purpose of affiliation motives is to establish trust, sympathy, and support. Such motives have two ways of expression - the hope for affiliation, the desire for approval and self-affirmation, and the fear of being misunderstood. This fear does not allow a person to feel comfortable in the process of communication, therefore such people are quite closed, do not arouse sympathy or trust, and are essentially alone. Diagnosis of affiliation motives is an important step in building fruitful and positive relationships with other people.

Positive Values

A person's motivation is determined by his expectations, which are based on past experience. If we take the category of expected value, then affiliation is a positive value. You can give the following example, a person will have a dialogue with a complete stranger. And the result of this communication depends on the expectations of success. The stronger this expectation, the higher its positiveattraction, and vice versa. Here you can observe a certain connection, when the expectation of success affects the behavior of a person and the course of action, while the course of events affects the result of communication. To build a successful dialogue, the expectation of success must be higher than the expectation of failure, this contributes to the fact that the positive attraction will prevail over the negative. But such a connection is inherent only in affiliation motives. For example, in the achievement motive, everything works the other way around. The higher the expectations of success, the lower the attractiveness of the task before the person.

Gender

Psychologists note that gender also affects affiliation motivation. For example, girls prefer to sincerely and openly share their experiences, guys try to build communications based on business issues and discussions. It should be noted that in addition to gender, age also has an influence. Over the years, the content of communication can change dramatically.

The tendency to affiliate increases when a person is involved in a potentially critical and stressful situation. It is at such moments that the surrounding people provide an opportunity to check whether the choice of the way of behavior in a dangerous situation is correct. As practice shows, the proximity of other people during a stressful situation leads to a decrease in anxiety and excitement, which positively affects not only the psychological, but also the physiological state. Blocking an affiliation by a person provokes feelings of loneliness, alienation and rejection.

Central motivational moment of communication

This category includes the choice of a temporary or permanent communication partner. The choice of a permanent partner is carried out not only by business, moral and intellectual qualities, but also by appearance. It is possible to determine the affiliation motives of a particular individual using various methods, of which there are a huge number. The most used technique to date was developed by Mehrabian. It is based on the diagnosis of two common motivators that are stable and are part of affiliate motives. These motivators are affiliation tendencies or love of fellowship and sensitivity to rejection, fear of rejection. These two categories are the basis for diagnosing affiliation motives according to A. Mehrabian.

Ethnic affiliation

Ethnic or group affiliation is focused on the desire of a certain ethnic group to get the support of other complementary ethnic groups. Group affiliation is expressed in the relationship between some groups, of which one is only an integral part of the other. Simply put, it is the interaction between groups that have different weight and scale in society. In this case, the larger group absorbs the smaller one and it begins to conduct its activities in accordance with the rules and values of the larger group. The modern theory of affiliation suggests that any person needs to belong to a certain group. Due to the instability of the transitional society, the individual feels the need for a familyor ethnicity, it reduces the feeling of anxiety and makes it possible to feel part of a whole. Ethnicity is formed at primary school age, when children acquire the first knowledge that relates to this area. By the age of 8-9, the child already clearly identifies himself as a certain ethnic group. Full ethnic identity and affiliation motives are formed around the age of 10-12.