Thematic Apperception Test (TAT-Style): See Which Motive Leads the Stories You Tell
Eight original ambiguous scenes, each with four short stories to choose from. Your result shows which of the three implicit motives from McClelland's research, achievement, affiliation or power, led the stories you reached for, as a share of your own choices. It is an educational, self-coded exercise in the spirit of the TAT, not the Thematic Apperception Test itself and not a clinical assessment, and you can save it as a PDF.
Reviewed byMichael Callans, MSWThematic Apperception Test (TAT-Style): Story Motives is a free, confidential 8-question self-assessment, original scenes · not the TAT · McClelland's three motives. It takes about 6 minutes, runs entirely in your browser, and gives you a plain-language profile of your strongest style plus an optional in-depth report. It is an educational screening, not a diagnosis.
Eight scenes, three motives, one honest read
A thematic apperception task shows you a scene with no fixed meaning and asks what is happening. Whatever story you tell, you brought. This page describes eight original scenes in words, offers four readings of each, and tallies which of McClelland's three implicit motives, achievement, affiliation or power, your readings leaned toward, alongside a plain descriptive option. Nothing is coded by a clinician and no result describes your personality.
The three implicit motives
Achievement (doing something well against a standard), affiliation (closeness, warmth and the fear of losing it) and power (having impact, influence or standing). These are the three motives McClelland and colleagues spent decades coding from imaginative stories, and each one is offered as a reading on every scene.
Eight original scenes, four readings each
The scenes are described in words and were written for Psychology.com; none of the TAT cards are reproduced or paraphrased. Every scene offers an achievement, an affiliation, a power and a plain descriptive reading, so each motive had exactly eight chances to be chosen and the bars compare like with like.
A plain account of the real TAT
The page explains what a clinician actually does with the TAT and with the research version, the Picture Story Exercise: free-told stories, trained coders, a published scoring manual, and norms. You see exactly how this page differs so you can judge your result for what it is.
| Feature | Typical free quiz | Psychology.com |
|---|---|---|
| Reproduces the copyrighted TAT cards | Often, without rights | Never; eight original scenes |
| Calls itself the TAT | Usually | No, and we explain the difference |
| Uses the research motive system (achievement, affiliation, power) | Rarely | Yes, one reading per motive on every scene |
| Claims to reveal your unconscious | Often | No; a share of your own choices |
| Shows how the result is calculated | Rarely | Yes, arithmetic you can check |
| Clinician-reviewed interpretation | Rarely | Yes, clinician reviewed |
| Answers stay on your device | Often collected | Scored in your browser; only summary scores if you request a PDF or report |
The 4 patterns this test measures
- Achievement: Your stories were about doing something well, meeting a standard, or getting better.
- Affiliation: Your stories were about closeness, keeping a bond, or the fear of losing one.
- Power: Your stories were about influence, impact, leading, or being seen.
- Descriptive: You mostly stayed with what was in the scene, without adding a motive.
If nothing is endorsed, every pattern scores the same, or the leading patterns tie, the result says so instead of naming a single pattern.
How your result is put together
Each of the eight scenes offers four short stories, and you pick the one closest to what you would have said if someone had asked you what is happening. One story on every scene carries achievement imagery (someone trying to do something well, meet a standard, or get better), one carries affiliation imagery (someone wanting closeness, repairing a bond, or dreading a loss), one carries power imagery (someone wanting to influence, impress, lead or control), and one is a plain description with no particular motive. Each choice counts as one point for its reading, and the bars on your result are the share of your eight choices that landed in each. Choose achievement four times and that bar reads fifty percent. There is no weighting and no hidden scoring.
The design keeps the comparison fair. All four readings appear on every scene, so each motive had exactly eight openings, and the descriptive option is always available so you are never forced to pick a motive that was not there for you. If two readings come out equal the page says so rather than picking a winner, and if the descriptive reading leads, the page tells you that plainly too, because a reader who stayed with the surface of the scenes has given a real answer.
What the percentages are not: they are not percentiles, not a comparison with other people, and not a measure of motive strength in the research sense. In the research version, trained coders score every sentence of a freely written story and the result is a count of motive imagery per thousand words, compared against norms. Here you are choosing among four pre-written stories. That is a fair way to notice which kind of story you reach for first, and it is not more than that.
What the Thematic Apperception Test actually is, and what this page is not
The Thematic Apperception Test was developed at the Harvard Psychological Clinic by Henry Murray and Christiana Morgan in the 1930s and published as a card set with a manual by Harvard University Press in 1943. It is a clinician-administered projective instrument: the psychologist shows a selection of the cards, which are mostly black-and-white pictures of people in ambiguous situations, and asks the person to tell a full story with a beginning, a middle and an end, including what the characters are thinking and feeling. The stories are recorded and interpreted, in Murray's original framework through the needs expressed by the hero of each story and the environmental pressures acting on them, and in later clinical practice through a range of scoring approaches, including the Social Cognition and Object Relations Scale. The cards are copyrighted, and using the instrument properly takes graduate training.
David McClelland and John Atkinson took the method out of the clinic in the 1950s and turned it into a research tool. They had people write brief stories to a handful of pictures and developed detailed coding manuals for three motives: the need for achievement, the need for affiliation and the need for power. In that tradition the task is usually called the Picture Story Exercise, and the scoring is done by trained coders who reach high agreement with each other using the published manuals collected in Charles Smith's 1992 handbook. A 1989 paper by McClelland, Koestner and Weinberger showed why this matters: motives coded from stories, which they called implicit motives, predict different things from the motives people claim for themselves on questionnaires, and the two often disagree within the same person.
None of that is happening on this page. The TAT cards are not shown, described or paraphrased; the eight scenes are original and were written for Psychology.com. You are choosing among four pre-written readings rather than telling a story of your own, nobody is coding your sentences, and nothing is compared against norms or interpreted by a clinician. We call this page TAT-style because it borrows the idea of an ambiguous scene and the three-motive coding scheme, and we do not call it the TAT because it is not one.
Implicit motives, and why a story task is used to find them
The idea behind the research is that some of what drives you is hard to see from the inside. Ask people what motivates them and they report their self-image, which is shaped by what they value and what they think they should want. Ask them to make up a story about strangers in an ambiguous picture and a different layer shows: the themes they reach for without deciding to. McClelland's group found that the story-coded motives predicted long-run patterns of behavior, such as entrepreneurial activity for achievement or management success for a particular form of power, better than questionnaires did, while questionnaires predicted deliberate choices better. The two layers are both real and they are often not aligned.
That is the honest reason to try a scene task at all, and it is also the reason not to over-read this one. A forced choice among four stories can show which theme you were drawn to on eight occasions. It cannot measure how strong a motive is, because you never generated any imagery yourself. If your result surprises you, that is the point to notice, not a verdict. If you want a research-backed picture of your drives, the Motivation Test: What Drives You test uses original items informed by self-determination theory, and for the traits that sit underneath, the Big Five Personality Test is the standard. For another original ambiguous-image exercise, the Inkblot Test takes the same honest approach to the Rorschach, and the Freudian Personality Test: Psychosexual Stages and Defense Style test looks at the older psychoanalytic ideas Murray was working alongside.
What to do with your result
Treat the leading motive as a question rather than an answer. If achievement led, ask whether the standards you measure yourself against are ones you chose. If affiliation led, ask where in your week closeness actually gets time, and what you do when you fear losing it. If power led, ask whether the influence you want is for its own sake or in service of something, since the research distinguishes a self-serving form from a socially oriented one. If the descriptive reading led, ask whether that reflects a settled, low-drama way of taking in situations, or a habit of staying at the surface when something underneath wants attention.
If any of this touches something you would rather not carry alone, a therapist who works with personality and motivation can help you look at what drives you with more care than a web page can. The directory link on your result page filters for that kind of work, and nothing about it requires a diagnosis.
Methodology & sources
This test is an original educational exercise in the thematic apperception tradition. The Thematic Apperception Test (Murray, 1943, Harvard University Press) is named nominatively as the source of the method; its cards are copyrighted and clinician-interpreted and nothing from them is reproduced, described or paraphrased here. The eight scenes were written for Psychology.com and are deliberately ambiguous, low-drama and free of any sexual content. The four readings on each scene were written to carry the imagery the McClelland tradition codes for: achievement (concern with a standard of excellence), affiliation (concern with establishing, keeping or restoring a warm relationship) and power (concern with having impact on others), plus one plain descriptive reading with no motive imagery. That mapping is our own editorial coding, not a validated application of the published scoring manuals.
Scoring is a straightforward tally. Each choice counts one point for its reading, and the result reports each reading as a share of your eight choices; ties and a leading descriptive reading are reported as such rather than resolved into a motive. No norms exist for this page, no reliability or validity data have been collected, and the percentages are not comparable to the imagery-per-word scores used in research with the Picture Story Exercise. The references describe the instrument's history, the three-motive coding tradition and the evidence that story-coded motives differ from self-reported ones; they do not validate this questionnaire, and the page is marked as not validated accordingly.
A note on what a profile like this can and cannot say: it can show which of four story types you reached for most on eight occasions. It cannot say how strong any motive is, cannot say anything about your unconscious, and cannot diagnose or rule out any condition. If a result lands with unexpected force, the useful move is reflection or a conversation, not a retake.
References
- Murray HA. Thematic Apperception Test Manual. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; 1943.
- McClelland DC, Atkinson JW, Clark RA, Lowell EL. The Achievement Motive. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts; 1953.
- McClelland DC, Koestner R, Weinberger J. How do self-attributed and implicit motives differ? Psychological Review. 1989;96(4):690-702. doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.96.4.690
- Smith CP, ed. Motivation and Personality: Handbook of Thematic Content Analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; 1992. ISBN 9780521400527.
Cite this source
Psychology.com. (2026, October 20). Thematic Apperception Test (TAT-Style): Story Motives. Psychology.com. https://psychology.com/tests/thematic-apperception
Thematic Apperception Test (TAT-Style): Story Motives FAQ
Is this the real Thematic Apperception Test?
No. The TAT is a set of copyrighted picture cards published by Harvard University Press in 1943, administered by a trained clinician who records and interprets the full stories a person tells. This page describes eight original scenes in words, offers four pre-written readings of each, and tallies which kind of reading you chose. It borrows the idea and the three-motive coding scheme from the research tradition; it is not the TAT and is not a clinical assessment.
What are the achievement, affiliation and power motives?
They are the three implicit motives that McClelland, Atkinson and colleagues coded from imaginative stories from the 1950s onward. Achievement is a concern with doing something well against a standard. Affiliation is a concern with warm relationships and with keeping or restoring them. Power is a concern with having impact on other people, whether by leading, persuading, impressing or controlling. Everyone has some of each; the research is about which one tends to color the stories you make up.
Why is there a plain, no-motive option on every scene?
Because the honest answer to an ambiguous scene is sometimes just a description of what is in it. In the research coding, a story with no motive imagery is scored as exactly that, and forcing a motive onto it would be a false reading. If the descriptive option leads your result, the page tells you so rather than pretending a motive won.
How do clinicians actually score the TAT?
A psychologist shows a selection of cards, asks for a full story with a beginning, a middle and an end, and writes down or records what the person says. The stories are then interpreted, in Murray's original framework through the needs of the story's hero and the pressures acting on them, and in later practice through formal systems such as the Social Cognition and Object Relations Scale. In research, trained coders apply published manuals for specific motives and compare counts against norms. None of that happens here.
Is the test really confidential?
Yes. It runs entirely in your browser. Your individual answers are scored in your browser and are never sent to us or linked to you. They stay in this tab so you can return to your result, and closing or clearing the tab clears them. If you ask us to email the PDF, we receive your summary scores with your email address, never your individual answers. No account is needed.
Which test should I take if I want a research-backed read on what drives me?
The Motivation Test uses original items informed by self-determination theory and gives a fuller picture of your drives than a scene task can. For the traits underneath, the Big Five Test is the standard. If you enjoyed the ambiguous-image format, the Inkblot Test takes the same honest approach to the Rorschach.
Related tests
Results in this topic, explained in full
Each named result from the tests in this topic has its own in-depth, clinician-reviewed profile: what it means, strengths and blind spots, and what the research says.