The Social Science Encyclopedia, Second Edition
Motivation, as the word implies, is what moves people. If most of psychology deals with ‘How’ questions, like ‘How do people perceive?’ or ‘How do people learn habits?’ the field of motivation is concerned with more fundamental ‘Why?’ questions. The most basic of these include ‘Why does the organism behave at all?’, ‘Why does this behaviour lead in one direction rather than another at a particular time?’ and ‘Why does the intensity or persistence of the behaviour vary at different times?’
The main types of answers which have been given to these sorts of questions since the end of the nineteenth century can be listed roughly chronologically in terms of when they were first proposed. Although each approach was developed to some extent in reaction to what went before, and was seen by its adherents as superior in some respect to its predecessors, proponents of all these approaches will be found in one form or another in present-day psychology.
First, the earliest approach was that of hedonism, which said simply that people behave in such a way as to maximize pleasure and minimize pain. From this perspective individuals were seen as being essentially rational beings, making sensible decisions about what courses of action to take in the light of their likely consequences in relation to pleasure or pain.
Second, the development of psychoanalysis from the early twentieth century onwards marked a break with this commonsense view. Freud argued that people are irrational and that their behaviour is largely determined by the outcome of the continual struggle between the powerful unconscious urges of the id (especially the sexual drive or eros) and the individual’s conscience, or superego, representing the dictates of society (see especially Freud 1933). Every subsequent form of depth psychology has had at least this in common with Freud’s original version: that individuals are seen as being to some extent at the mercy of psychological forces which are outside their conscious control, and that they are usually unaware of the real reasons for their actions.
Third, instinct theorists, like William McDougall (1908), also emphasized the non-rational side of human nature, bringing out the continuity between animal and human motivation, and answering the ‘Why’ questions in the context of Darwinian biology. This general approach was readopted by ethologists like Tinbergen (1951), although the research techniques and interests of ethologists are remote from those of McDougall.
Fourth, as laboratory experimental work with animals came to dominate psychology, so another motivational concept began to hold sway: that of drive. This concept was introduced by Woodworth (1918) to describe the strength of internal forces which impel the organism into action. The main advantage of this concept was that drive could be defined operationally, for example, by the number of hours of food deprivation; in this way motivation could be quantified and made more amenable to rigorous scientific investigation. There was broad agreement that such biological drives existed as a hunger drive, a thirst drive and a sexual drive; later some theorists added various social drives and even such drives as an exploratory drive. The use of the concept probably reached its high point in the elaborate learning theory of Clark Hull (1943), one of the basic ideas of which was that the aim of all behaviour is ‘drive-reduction’, this being ‘reinforcing’ to the organism.
Fifth, a major problem with the notion of drive-reduction was that the organism, especially the human organism, often seems to be engaged in attempts to increase its stimulation and to present itself with challenges, rather than always to maintain drive at as low a level as possible. This problem was overcome with optimal arousal theory, originally proposed by Hebb (1955), which suggested that the organism is seeking to attain, and maintain, some level of arousal which is intermediate on the arousal dimension. Thus, the organism is provoked into action not only when arousal is too high but also when it is too low (the latter being experienced, for example, by feelings of boredom). A further advantage of this theory was that the arousal concept provided a way of linking psychological and physiological research.
Sixth, a completely different approach to motivation was taken by Maslow (1954), with his notion of self-actualization, a concept which has subsequently become one of the mainstays of humanistic psychology. The general idea is that people have a fundamental need to grow psychologically in such a way that they become fully individual and fulfil their own potentials. According to Maslow there is a need hierarchy which ascends from physiological and safety needs, up through the need to belong and love and the need for self-esteem, to the highest level, that of self-actualization itself. Living involves a kind of snakes-and-ladders course up and down this hierarchy, but the aim is always to reach the top, success in which is marked by so-called peak experiences.
Finally, in the 1980s reversal theory (Apter 1989) made a radical challenge to the basic assumption on which all the other theories of motivation are based, namely, that of homeostasis (in its broadest systems-theory sense). This implies that there is some single preferred state which the organism attempts at all times to achieve, and to maintain once achieved. This may be, for example, low drive, intermediate arousal or the top of a need hierarchy. However it is defined, it remains a relatively unchanging end-point for the organism to strive towards. Reversal theory argues that this is an absurd oversimplification and that, at least in the human case, people want quite contrary things at different times and are in this respect inherently inconsistent. To give just one example, sometimes people want extremely low arousal (for example, when very tired) and at other times they want extremely high arousal (such as during sexual intercourse or while watching sport). The end-point, therefore, is dynamic rather than static, and the overall situation is better characterized as one of multistability than homeostasis.
Michael J.Apter
Yale University
References
Apter, M.J. (1989) Reversal Theory: Motivation, Emotion and Personality, London.
Freud, S. (1933) New Introductory lectures on Psychoanalysis, New York .
Hebb, D.O. (1955) ‘Drives and the C.N.S. (Conceptual Nervous System)’, Psychological Review 62.
Hull, C.L. (1943) Principles of Behavior, New York.
McDougall, W. (1908) An Introduction to Social Psychology, London.
Maslow, A.H. (1954) Motivation and Personality, New York.
Tinbergen, N. (1951) The Study of Instinct, London.
Woodworth, R.S. (1918) Dynamic Psychology, New York.
Further reading
Evans, P. (1989) Motivation and Emotion, London.
Franken, R.E. (1988) Human Motivation, 2nd edn, Monterey, CA.
Houston, J.P. (1985) Motivation, New York.
See also: instinct; learning; psychoanalysis.
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