ABSTRACT
Surveying currenl work on motivation in social perception is like watching Carnival at Mardi Gras: There's a lot of it out there; it's intensely colorful, exciting, and human; it has a long, rich tradition but appears chaotic at first . Rather than be overwhelmed by the sheer impact of all that noisy human frenzy, a big-picture perspective seeks patterns of activity and directions of movement. This chapter offers onc heuristic framework for systematizing the patterns of motivations we currently slUdy and have studied over time (patterns of activity); it also points to gaps waiting to be filled (directions of movement). The framework of motives applies to more than social perception research because it has proved useful in surveys of social psychological theory more generally (Fiske, 2001 , in press).
