Picture Story Exercise
PSE — Implicit Motive Assessment · deterministic content-analysis scoring
You view four picture cues, one at a time, and write a short imaginative story for each. A deterministic content-analysis engine then scores your stories for three implicit motives — Achievement, Power, and Affiliation. The scoring is reproducible and symbol-counted: the same stories always yield the same result, with no AI inference.
How it works
- 1View four picture cues. Each picture is shown on its own, with a classic set of guiding prompts.
- 2Write a short story for each. A vivid paragraph is plenty; spend about a minute per picture.
- 3Get your implicit-motive profile. The engine scores all four stories and returns a relative profile across the three motives, a dominant motive, and the underlying coefficients.
The three implicit motives
nAch — Achievement
Concern with a standard of excellence — doing something better, mastering a challenge. In the literature, implicit achievement predicts persistence on challenging tasks and entrepreneurial behavior.
nPow — Power
Concern with having impact on, or influence over, other people. Implicit power is associated with leadership behavior and physiological reactivity under challenge.
nAff — Affiliation
Concern with establishing or maintaining warm, close relationships. Implicit affiliation is associated with cooperative behavior and sensitivity to interpersonal cues.
How scoring works
Scoring is deterministic and reproducible — there is no AI or probabilistic inference. Two content discriminators, ported from a C++ reference engine, are applied to your written stories:
Achievement discriminator
Indexed by the balance of approach versus avoidance imagery — language about striving, mastery, and doing well, weighed against language about failure and avoidance. Achievement leans positive when approach imagery outweighs avoidance imagery.
Power vs. affiliation discriminator
Distinguished by emotional tone using the NRC emotion lexicon: concern expressed with negative or assertive affect indexes power, while warmth and joy index affiliation.
Your four stories are scored and combined into a relative motive profile. A single session is indicative, not diagnostic.
Why implicit measurement matters
Implicit motives (expressed in narrative) and explicit motives (rated on self-report scales) are empirically distinct constructs that predict different outcomes. Implicit motives tend to predict long-term behavioral patterns and physiological responses; explicit motives tend to predict deliberate choices and stated intentions. The PSE is one of the few approaches that accesses the implicit motivational layer.
The three motives assessed here trace to the implicit-motive tradition of McClelland and Winter. The scoring on this site is an automated lexical content-analysis approximation of those constructs — fast and fully reproducible — rather than hand-applied manual coding.