What is motivation in psychology?

Introduction

Research in motivation is pivotal to such fields as educational psychology, social psychology, behavioral psychology, and most other subareas of psychology. Motivation is centrally concerned with the goals people set for themselves and with the means they take to achieve these goals. It is also concerned with how people react to and process information, activities directly related to learning. People’s motivation to process information is influenced by two major factors: the relevance of the topic to the person processing the information, which affects their willingness to think hard about the topic; and the need for cognition, or people’s willingness to think hard about varied topics, whether they are directly relevant to them or not. The relevance of a topic is central to people’s motivation to learn about it.

For example, if the community in which a person lives experiences a severe budgetary crisis that will necessitate a substantial increase in property taxes, every resident in that community, home owners and renters alike, is going to be affected directly or indirectly by the increase. Because this increase is relevant to all the residents, they will, predictably, be much concerned with the topic and will likely think hard about its salient details. If, on the other hand, a community in a distant state faces such a crisis, residents in other communities, reading or hearing about the situation, will not have the motivation to do much hard thinking about it because it does not affect them directly.

The second category of motivation rests in the need of some individuals for cognition. Their inherent curiosity will motivate them to think deeply about various topics that do not concern them directly but that they feel a need to understand more fully. Such people are deliberative, self-motivated thinkers possessed of an innate curiosity about the world that surrounds them. They generally function at a higher intellectual level than people who engage in hard thinking primarily about topics that affect them directly. One of the aims of education at all levels is to stimulate people to think about a broad variety of topics, which they will do because they have an inherent curiosity that they long to satisfy.

Early Concerns with Motivation

During the late nineteenth century, Austrian psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud
developed theories about motivation that are usually categorized as the psychodynamic approach. He contended that people have psychic energy that is essentially sexual or aggressive in its origins. Such energy seeks results that please, satisfy, or delight. This pleasure principle, as it was called, had to function within the bounds of certain restraints, identified as the reality principle, never violating the demands of people’s conscience or of the restraints or inhibitions that their self-images imposed. In Freudian terms, the superego served to maintain the balance between the pleasure principle and the reality principle. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1922), Freud reached the conclusion that all motivation could be reduced to two opposing sources of energy, the life instinct and the death instinct.

Heinz Hartmann went a step beyond Freud’s psychodynamic theory, emphasizing the need for people to achieve their goals in ways that do not produce inner conflict, that are free of actions that might compromise or devastate the ego. More idealistic was Robert White, who denied Freud’s contention that motivation is sexual or aggressive in nature. White contended that the motivation to achieve competence is basic in people. Everyone, according to White, wishes to be competent and, given proper guidance, will strive to achieve competence, although individual goals and individual determinations of the areas in which they wish to be competent vary greatly from person to person.

Such social psychologists as Erik H. Erikson, Carl Jung, and Karen Horney turned their attention away from the biological and sexual nature of motivation, focusing instead on its social aspects. They, like Freud, Hartmann, and White before them, sought to understand the unconscious means by which psychic energy is distributed as it ferrets out sources of gratification.

The Behaviorists

The behavioral approach to motivation is centrally concerned with rewards and punishments. People cultivate behaviors for which they are rewarded. They avoid behaviors that experience has shown them will result in pain or punishment. B. F. Skinner was probably the most influential behaviorist. Many educators accepted his theories and applied them to social as well as teaching situations.

Clark L. Hull, working experimentally with rats, determined that animals deprived of such basic requirements as food or punished by painful means, such as electric shock, develop intense reactions to these stimuli. John Dollard and Neal Miller extended Hull’s work to human subjects. They discovered that the response elicited by these means depends on the intensity of the stimulus, not on its origin. The stimuli employed also evoke previously experienced stimulus-response reactions, so that if subjects are hurt or punished following a volitional act, they will in future avoid such an act. In other words, if the negative stimuli are rapidly reduced, the responses that immediately preceded the reduction are reinforced. These researchers concluded that physiological needs such as hunger are innate, whereas secondary drives and the reaction to all drives, through conditioning, are learned.

Ivan Petrovich Pavlov demonstrated the strength of conditioned responses in his renowned experiments with dogs. He arranged for a bell to sound immediately before the dogs in his experiment were to be fed. The dogs came to associate the sound of a bell with being fed, a pleasurable and satisfying experience. Eventually, when Pavlov rang the bell but failed to follow its ringing with feeding, the dogs salivated merely on hearing the sound because they anticipated the feeding to which they had become conditioned. Over time, the motivation to satisfy their hunger came to be as much related to hearing the bell as it was to their actually being fed. Pavlovian conditioning is directly related to motivation, in this case the motivation to satisfy hunger.

Konrad Lorenz’s Hydraulic Model

Freud argued that if instinctive urges are bottled up, they will eventually make the individual ill. They demand release and will find it in one way or another as the unconscious mind works to direct the distribution of people’s psychic energy.

Konrad Lorenz carried this notion a step beyond what Freud had postulated, contending that inherent drives that are not released by external means will explode spontaneously through some inherent releasing mechanism. This theory, termed Lorenz’s hydraulic model, explains psychic collapses in some people, particularly in those who are markedly repressed.

Erich Fromm carried Freud’s notions about the repression of innate drives one step beyond what Lorenz espoused. Fromm added a moral dimension to what Freud and Lorenz asserted by postulating that humans develop character as a means of managing and controlling their innate physiological and psychological needs. He brought the matter of free will into his consideration of how to deal in a positive way with innate drives.

The Hedonistic Theory of Motivation

Hedonism emphasizes pleasure over everything else. The hedonistic theory of motivation stems from Freud’s recognition of the pleasure principle, which stipulates that motivation is stimulated by pleasure and inhibited by pain.

Laboratory experiments with rats demonstrated unequivocally that, given a choice, rats work harder to get food that tastes good to them than to get food that is nutritious. Indeed, laboratory animals will take in empty calories to the point of emaciation as long as the food that contains such calories tastes good. It is thought that hedonistic motivation is directly related to pleasure centers in the brain, so that organisms work both consciously and unconsciously toward stimulating and satisfying these pleasure centers.

The Incentive Theory of Motivation

Alfred Adler, the Austrian psychologist who founded the school of individual psychology, rejected Freud’s emphases on sex and aggression as fundamental aspects of motivation. Breaking from Freud, who had been among his earliest professional associates, Adler contended that childhood feelings of helplessness led to later feelings of inferiority. His means of treating the inferiority complex, as this condition came to be known, was to engage his patients in positive social interaction. To do this, he developed an incentive theory of motivation, as articulated in his two major works, Praxis und Theorie der Individual psychologie (1920; The Practice and Theory of Individual Psychology, 1924) and Menschenkenntnis (1927; Understanding Human Nature, 1927).

Adler’s theory focused on helping people to realize the satisfaction involved in achieving superiority and competence in areas in which they had some aptitude. The motivation to do so is strictly personal and individual. Adler’s entire system was based on the satisfactions to be derived from achieving a modicum of superiority. The incentive approach views competence as a basic motivation activated by people’s wish to avoid failure. This is a reward/punishment approach, although it is quite different from that of the behaviorists and is in essence humanistic. The reward is competence; the punishment is failure. Both factors stimulate subjects’ motivation.

The Activation Theory of Motivation

Drive reductionists believed that if all of an organism’s needs are fulfilled, that organism will lapse into a lethargic state. They conclude that increasing needs will cause the organism to have an increased drive to fulfill those needs. Their view is that the inevitable course that individual organisms select is that of least resistance.

Donald O. Hebb, however, takes a more sanguine view of motivation, particularly in humans. In his activation theory, he contends that a middle ground between lethargy at one extreme and incapacitating anxiety at the other produces the most desirable level of motivation. This theory accounts for states of desired arousal such as that found in such pursuits as competitive sports.

The drive reductionists ascribe to the reward/punishment views of most of the behaviorists, who essentially consider organisms to be entities in need of direction, possibly of manipulation. The drive inductionists, on the other hand, have faith in the innate need of organisms to be self-directive and to work individually toward gaining competence. Essentially they accept the Greek ideal of the golden mean as a guiding principle, which has also been influential in the thinking of such humanistic psychologists.

The Humanistic Approach to Motivation

Abraham Maslow devised a useful though controversial hierarchy of needs
required to satisfy human potential. These needs proceed from low-level physiological needs such as hunger, thirst, sex, and comfort, through such other needs as safety, love, and esteem, finally reaching the highest level, self-actualization. According to Maslow, human beings progress sequentially through this hierarchy as they develop. Each category of needs proceeds from the preceding category, and no category is omitted as the human develops, although the final and highest category, self-actualization, which includes curiosity, creative living, and fulfilling work, is not necessarily attained or attainable by all humans.

The humanists stipulate that people’s primary motives are those that lead toward self-actualization, those that capitalize on the unique potential of each individual. In educational terms, this means that for education to be effective, it must emphasize exploration and discovery over memorization and the rote learning of a set body of material. It must also be highly individualized, although this does not imply a one-on-one relationship between students and their teachers. Rather than acting as fonts of knowledge, teachers become facilitators of learning, directing their students individually to achieve the actualization of the personal goals that best suit them.

Carl R. Rogers traced much psychopathology to conflicts between people’s inherent understanding of what they require to move toward self-actualization and society’s expectations, which may run counter to individual needs. In other words, as many people develop and pass through the educational system, they may be encouraged or required to adopt goals that are opposed to those that are most realistic for them. Humanistic views of human development run counter to the views of most of the psychodynamic and behaviorist psychologists concerned with learning theory and motivation as it relates to such theory.

Cognitive Approaches to Motivation

The research of Kurt Lewin in the subjective tension systems that work toward resolution of problems in humans along with his research, done in collaboration with Edward C. Tolman, that emphasizes expectancies and the subjective value of the results of actions has led to a cognitive approach to motivation. Related to this research is that of Leon Festinger, whose theory of
cognitive dissonance stipulates that if people’s beliefs are not in harmony with each other, they will experience a discomfort that they will attempt to eliminate by altering their beliefs.

People ultimately realize that certain specific behaviors will lead to anticipated results. Behavior, therefore, has a purpose, but the number of goals related to specific behaviors is virtually infinite. People learn to behave in ways that make it most likely to achieve expected results.

Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson demonstrated that teacher expectations have a great deal to do with the success of the students with whom they work. Their experiment, detailed fully in Pygmalion in the Classroom (1968), relates how they selected preadolescent and adolescent students randomly and then told the teachers of those students that they had devised a way of determining which students were likely to show spurts of unusual mental growth in the coming year.

Each teacher was given the names of two or three students who were identified as being on the brink of rapid intellectual development. The researchers tested the students at the end of the school year and found that those who had been designated as poised on the brink of unusual mental development tested above the norm even though they had been selected randomly from all the students in the classes involved. In this experiment, teacher motivation to help certain students succeed appears to have been central to those students’ achieving goals beyond those of other students in the class.

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