Expectation and Attractiveness of Group Membership as Functions of Task Difficulty and Magnitude of Reward

Expectation and attractiveness of group membership were measured under conditions of concurrent but independent variation of task difficulty and associated reward magnitude. The experiment was initially performed on a sample of 108 high school psychology students and was replicated on a separate sample of 99 Ss from the same population. In both experiments, the results indicated that task difficulty affected neither dependent variable, but that both expectation and attractiveness increased with greater magnitude of reward. With task difficulty held constant, goal attractiveness varied directly with magnitude of reward, and, by implication, with goal expectation. A post hoc analysis suggested that the effects of magnitude of reward upon attractiveness of group membership were mediated via expectation of attaining this goal.