The book «Introduction to Psychology». Authors — R.L. Atkinson, R.S. Atkinson, E.E. Smith, D.J. Boehm, S. Nolen-Hoeksema. Under the general editorship of V.P. Zinchenko. 15th international edition, St. Petersburg, Prime Eurosign, 2007.
Article from chapter 10. Basic motives
You’re driving down the freeway, trying to make it to an important job interview. You got up late this morning, so you had to skip breakfast, and now you’re hungry. It seems like every billboard you drive past advertises food—delicious scrambled eggs, juicy burgers, cool fruit juice. Your stomach growls, you try not to pay attention to it, then you fail. With every kilometer, the feeling of hunger intensifies. You almost crash into the car in front of you while looking at a pizza ad. In short, you are in the grip of a motivational state known as hunger.
Motivation is a state that activates and directs our behavior.
Subjectively, such states are experienced by us as conscious desires. Most of us can choose whether or not to act according to our desires. You can force yourself to give up what you want and force yourself to do what you don’t want. We may even freely decide not to think about the desires we refuse to fulfill. It is much more difficult — and perhaps impossible — to directly control your motivation. Motives exist beyond our will. It’s hard not to want food when you’re hungry. When it is hot or thirsty, one cannot resist the desire for a cool breeze or a cold drink. Conscious choice is more a consequence of motivational states than their cause. What governs our motives, if not our own rational choice?
Causes of motives range from the most microscopic, which include psychological events occurring in the body and brain, to the macroscopic, encompassing cultural and social interactions with other individuals around us. In this chapter we will discuss the regulation of organic motives such as thirst, hunger and sex. These motives arise predominantly from our biological heredity and reveal the general principles of the operation of motives and rewards that guide the behavior of both man and animals. Social aspirations and cultural influences on motivation will be discussed later.
In connection with organic motives, which include hunger, thirst, and sex, psychologists have traditionally distinguished two types of theories of motivation. This difference has to do with where motivation comes from, what causes it, and how it controls behavior. On the one hand, there are needs theories that emphasize the role of internal factors in motivation. It is believed that some internal needs associated with hunger and thirst reflect basic physiological needs. For motives such as sex and aggression, need factors are less tied to absolute physiological needs. After all, do we need to aggressively attack another as much as we need food and drink? Yet aggression and sex are needs in the sense that internal factors such as hormonal status are often important, and in the sense that they may have originally developed as a means of satisfying basic needs related to the perpetuation of the species.
On the other hand, there are drive theories that emphasize the motivating role of external events or goals that we strive for. Food, drink, sexual partners, objects of attack, relationships with others, respect, money, and rewards for success are all motivators. The motivator is the subject of our motivation. After all, our motives do not operate in a vacuum: when we want, we always want something. The nature of that something pushes us in one direction or another. So we find a certain stimulus and work on it. The goal could be delicious food, drinking water, a partner to interact with, expelling an intruder, or possession of a contested resource. Many stimuli are united by a common property: they have the function of reinforcement. They can generate pleasure and reinforce the behavior directed at them.
Some stimuli have the property of primary reinforcement and are able to act as rewards regardless of prior learning. For example, a sweet taste or sexual sensation may be pleasant the first time it occurs. Other stimuli are secondary reinforcers, acquiring their status in part through a learning process in which they are connected to other events. For example, money or a good position can be powerful motivators based on cultural experience with them and what they are. In animals, a conditioned stimulus presented in combination with food can serve as a strong reinforcer. In each case, learning plays a critical role in the formation of a secondary reinforcer. Learning may, although to a lesser extent, even play a role in modulating the strength of some primary reinforcers. For example, you may have been hungry when. were born, but at the same time you had no idea about the types of food that you prefer now. Drive theories of motivation focus on the relationship between learning and experience in driving motives. Theories that view motivation as either a need or a drive approach the regulation of motives in different ways. But the theoretical difference between them is rooted in points of view rather than in the essence of the subject itself. In fact, there are no contradictions between them. It is generally accepted that almost all types of motivation involve processes of both kinds (Toates, 1986).
Just for didactic purposes, it is more convenient to focus on one type of regulation and understand it more deeply, and then move on to another. Therefore, we will first consider the processes related to urges, after which we will focus on the processes related to needs. In real life, motivation simultaneously depends on the motivation factor and on the need factor, and often these factors interact (Fig. 10.1). The need factor can enhance the motivating effect of the drive: for example, many people find food tastes better when they are hungry (Cabanac, 1979). Have you ever skipped lunch so that you can enjoy your evening meal more? Or maybe you were scolded for the habit of «intercepting» something, which discourages appetite before dinner? Conversely, motivating factors can arouse needs. Have you ever caught a delicious aroma from a bakery or restaurant on the go and suddenly felt hungry?
Rice. 10.1. Model of the main motives. An external stimulus, such as the sight of food, is compared in memory with its past reinforcing function. At the same time, the physiological signals of hunger and satiety modulate its potential value in the moment. These two types of information are integrated to create the ultimate excitatory motivation in relation to the external stimulus, which manifests itself in behavior and conscious experience (adapted from: Toates, 1986).
Reinforcement and Incentive Motivation
As a rule, the motive directs behavior to a specific stimulus that causes pleasure or alleviates an unpleasant state: food, drink, sex, etc. In other words, motivating motivation is affective and is a product of pleasure or displeasure. Psychologists once believed that almost every sensation, in addition to intensity and its other sensory qualities, had some degree of pleasantness or unpleasantness. See →