ABSTRACT
American personality theorist Henry Murray, writing in the late 1930s, identified a large number of ‘needs’, among them need for achievement usually referred to as N-Ach. This particular ‘need’ soon attracted more attention than most of the others, leading to an extensive literature on ‘Achievement Motivation’ from the late 1950s into the early 1960s and including the creation of methods of assessing or measuring ‘N-Ach’ (‘n.Ach’ and ‘N.ach’ being occasional slight variations) beyond Murray’s own thematic apperception test method. This research genre became, for a while, a significant strand in US Social Psychology with attempts made to apply it to ancient and nonEuropean cultures, using e.g. decorative design motifs as indices of level of N-Ach on the basis that certain design features such as strong ascending lines signified higher levels than others, such as circles or descending lines. This particular project was highly speculative and short-lived. A more enduring consequence was the devising of a number of psychometric techniques for assessing not only N-Ach itself but related issues such as fear of failure and, indeed, fear of success. These tests often took the form of tests of Level of Aspiration (LoA), requiring those taking them to estimate, for example, the number of simple faces they would be able to draw in a minute (filling in a sheet of circles). This led to the identification of phenomena such as under-achievement. A series, Advances in Motivation and Achievement, continued to be issued into the 1990s (see Urdan, 1999).
