Motivation
Measuring what makes social interactions enjoyable
Open access · cc by · source: Europe PMC
Researchers developed and validated a 23-item questionnaire that measures six distinct types of social reward, showing that different people find different social experiences pleasurable.
How this study connects
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What people find rewarding about other people divides into components that need separate measurement.
Social reward is not one motive. A six-factor structure separated Admiration, Negative Social Potency, Passivity, Prosocial Interactions, Sexual Relationships and Sociability, with subscale alphas from 0.77 to 0.87 and high test-retest reliability.
Evidence for the claim as stated.
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Measuring what makes social interactions enjoyable
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123 items
This phase generated a total of 123 items (five to nine items for each proposed type of social reward).
eight experts
A panel of eight graduate-level psychology researchers with expertise in reward processing, social processing and/or social neuroscience were shown all 123 items grouped into the proposed types of social reward.
Key findings
The analyses confirmed a robust six-factor structure for social reward: Admiration, Negative Social Potency, Passivity, Prosocial Interactions, Sexual Relationships, and Sociability. The subscales showed strong internal consistency, with alphas ranging from 0.77 to 0.87, and high test-retest reliability over a 12.0-day average span, with correlations averaging 0.80. Construct validity was supported by expected correlations, such as a negative correlation of -0.56 between Prosocial Interactions and Negative Social Potency.
Methodology
The researchers generated an initial list of 123 items to measure different types of social enjoyment, which a panel of eight experts reduced to 75 items. In Sample 1, 305 participants completed the online pilot survey, and exploratory factor analysis was used to identify the underlying reward structure and prune the survey down to 23 items. In Sample 2, 505 new participants completed the 23-item survey alongside established personality measures to test the questionnaire's validity, and 45 of these participants retook the test 10 to 14 days later to assess reliability.
Limitations
Because the questionnaire relies entirely on self-reports, it does not prove that people's subjective ratings of enjoyment perfectly match their real-world social behaviors or objective physiological reward responses. The study cannot establish causal relationships between personality traits and social reward preferences, as the data are strictly correlational. Additionally, the findings may not generalize globally, as the samples were recruited via Amazon's Mechanical Turk, and the self-report format may be difficult for clinical populations with introspective challenges, such as individuals with autism.
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