RESEARCH ARTICLE Facing Competing Motives: Testing for Motivational Tradeoffs in Affiliative and Pathogen-Avoidant Motives via Extraverted Face Preferences Mitch Brown 1,2 & Mary M. Medlin 1 & Donald F. Sacco 1 & Steven G. Young 3 # Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 Abstract Affiliative and pathogen-avoidant motives adaptively influence interpersonal preferences. For facial structures connoting extra- version, affiliative motives heighten preferences for extraverted faces, whereas pathogen-avoidant motives downregulate pref- erences. Despite what appears to be competing tension between motives for preferences in extraverted faces, previous research had yet to identify this possibility within a single experiment. The current study temporally activated an affiliative, pathogen- avoidant, or control state before tasking participants with indicating preferences for extraverted faces, relative to introverted, and support for campus-wide social networking activities to demonstrate convergence with previous findings demonstrating temporal shifts in affiliative interest. Although activated motivational states did not influence interpersonal preferences directly in this study, mediation analyses revealed participants’ upregulated extraverted face preferences and support for a campus social network following an exclusionary experience because of a heightened affiliative desire. We frame results as motivational tradeoffs, offering suggestions to identify competing motive effects more effectively for future research. Keywords Disease . Exclusion . Motivational tradeoff . Extraversion . Face perception In pursuing survival and reproductive goals, fundamental mo- tives adaptively shape interpersonal behaviors. Two pervasive motives include seeking affiliation and avoiding infection (Baumeister and Leary 1995; Murray and Schaller 2016). Proximate environmental threats (e.g., social exclusion, dis- ease prevalence) lead individuals to prioritize specific motives at the expense of others, thus adaptively influencing interper- sonal preferences to optimize benefits and minimize costs (Kenrick et al. 2010). Affiliative and pathogen-avoidant mo- tives appear to work in opposition to each other, with the salience of one motive muting that of the other, necessitating a tradeoff in interpersonal preferences in a manner that favors those capable of mitigating disease threat or enhancing affiliative opportunities (Sacco et al. 2014). Recent work has shown how tradeoffs between affiliative and pathogen-avoidant motives shift individuals’ preferences for facial cues. Specifically, these motives are especially in- strumental in shaping preferences for extraversion (Brown and Sacco 2016, 2017; Brown et al. 2019), a trait implicated in offering affiliative benefits while posing infection risk (Ashton and Lee 2007; Nettle 2005). Specifically, whereas affiliative motives upregulate preferences for extraverted fa- cial structures, pathogen-avoidant motives downregulate this preference. However, previous studies only considered these motives separately, rather than simultaneously. This experi- ment sought to address this limitation by determining whether preferences for extraversion differ as a function of these so- matic motives. Tradeoffs in Affiliative and Pathogen-Avoidant Motives Despite group living being essential for human survival, inter- personal contact poses risk (e.g., disease exposure), necessi- tating some caution when choosing interaction partners * Mitch Brown mitchellbrown@usm.edu 1 School of Psychology, Owings-McQuagge Hall 226, The University of Southern Mississippi, Hattiesburg, MS 39401, USA 2 Present address: Fairleigh Dickinson University, Teaneck, NJ, USA 3 CUNY Baruch College, New York City, NY, USA Evolutionary Psychological Science https://doi.org/10.1007/s40806-019-00200-5