Social Motivation: How We Measure and Understand It
Neuropsychologist Antonia Hamilton discusses how motivation is measured, the nature of social perception in both typical and atypical cases, and laboratory research in social neuroscience.
What Is Social Motivation?
The concept of social motivation isn’t new. According to this idea, we are driven to work and spend time with others—it’s essential for our well-being.
Testing Motivational Factors
Recently, a theory of social motivation in people with autism has been developed. Their motivation to interact with others is different. Often, they avoid making eye contact, engaging with people, or learning from them.
Isolating and testing motivational factors is not easy. You could ask someone what they’d like to do on a Saturday night: go out to a restaurant with friends or stay home and play computer games alone. The answers might give some idea of their social motivation, but they don’t allow for precise measurement or the development of a scientific theory.
In our lab, we’ve tried to find new ways to measure motivation. In one experiment, people choose to watch one of two short video clips (two to three seconds each). The first shows a person looking into the camera, smiling, and appearing friendly and lively. The second shows a small table spinning with a few household objects—usually uninteresting ones.
We show participants boxes of different colors, for example, blue and orange. They know that choosing the blue box will show them the social video, while the orange box will show the object video. By observing their choices, we can try to measure how motivated they are to watch social phenomena. To quantify differences in motivation, we assign a “cost” to each box. For example, opening the blue box might require three actions (longer and more tedious than just one).
During this experiment, we study the brain’s motivation systems using a brain activity scanner. This has taught us a lot about the brain systems involved in rewards for non-social actions. We can see whether the same brain systems are activated when people receive material rewards (like food or money) and social rewards (like seeing smiling people).
Social Motivation in People with Autism
In a recent study, adults with autism and neurotypical adults chose to watch one of three videos. In the first, a person made eye contact with the viewer; in the second, the person looked away; in the third, household objects were shown. Neurotypical adults preferred the first video over the second, but for people with autism, there was no difference between the last two. However, they still preferred people over objects to some extent: people with autism are not so much bothered by people in general as by eye contact. It’s well known that they often avoid eye contact, find it intimidating, and are unsure how to interpret it.
Such studies provide the first quantitative results and help us understand how people with autism perceive and use eye contact. In the future, we want to determine how many different social signals fuel motivation. We want to study eye contact in more detail and understand what makes people seek it out or avoid it. What’s the difference between people with autism who avoid eye contact and people with social anxiety disorder? The latter also avoid looking at others and aren’t motivated to interact, but perhaps for different reasons. There’s a growing number of studies aiming to identify and measure motivation quantitatively.
Questions of social motivation lead us to study eye contact and prolonged gaze. The latter is used as a measure of motivation because it’s easy to experiment with. You can show people images of faces and use eye-tracking sensors to see where they look on the picture.
Typical adults or children, when looking at photos of faces, tend to focus on the eyes and mouth. Results for people with autism are mixed: in some studies, they look at the eyes, in others, they don’t. However, when they see more natural stimuli (like a video of someone speaking, rather than a static image), the difference in motivation becomes clearer. The closer our lab methods are to real-world conditions, the better our results.
Studying Social Motivation in the Real World
If you show typical people photos of faces, they easily look into the eyes, but during video calls (like on Skype), they do this less often. In real interactions, motivation and the signals you send to your conversation partner are very different. With a static photo, you can look wherever you want without embarrassment, choosing any social information you like. But in real life, staring into someone’s eyes for too long disrupts social interaction. It’s becoming increasingly clear that social neuroscience needs to study real interactions and their contexts to get accurate measures of motivation and behavior. This way, lab research won’t be so far removed from real life.
We’re now trying to go beyond some traditional lab methods and make studies more interactive. For example, observing how you turn toward someone, how someone turns toward you, or how someone returns your gaze. We’re conducting research outside of MRI scanners, in richer, real-world contexts. When we take neuroscience out of the lab, we get better results and learn what motivates people in everyday life. We also better understand individual differences in behavior—not just in autism, but also in social anxiety disorder and other psychiatric conditions that affect social interaction.
Studying social motivation is important for understanding individual differences in social behavior. Each person’s motivation is unique and can change throughout the day, week, or lifetime. Teenagers (and people at different stages of development) have their own unique social motivation. If we can measure it quantitatively and understand what it’s based on, we’ll have a broader and stronger scientific foundation. This will help us understand why people make certain decisions and teach us how to work with a wide range of social psychological states (many of which have a motivational aspect). The long-term goal of such research is to help people who struggle in social situations.