How should we go about trying to learning about and understand another person’s motivation, our own motivation, the nature of motivation?
The most common method used to learn information from another person is to ask them a question. There is an extensive literature on using questions (interviews) to gather information in clinical services, in politics, in law enforcement, in interpersonal relationships, in the social sciences.
However, many authors/investigators have questioned the utility or limits of direct questions for many purposes, including understanding human motivation.
Issues in inferring motives from verbal reports:
- Person may not wish to share the information
- embarrassment, shame, guilt
- potential negative consequences to disclosing the information
- social pressure to withhold the information
- Conditions associated with veridical reports:
- absence of coercion
- absence of negative consequences for truthfulness
- open ended and non-leading questions
- independent verification (and, of course, that the person in fact knows the truth)
- Has forgotten entirely
- Doesn’t recall accurately
- The information is not available for verbal report
- information is not available to consciousness
- information is actively suppressed from consciousness
- Is there a deep structure to human motivation?
Is there a basic, fundamental, foundational source of human motivation from which various self-attributed (explicit) motivations are derived?
If so, what is its nature and how can it best be assessed?
This issue has been raised with respect to other aspects of human functioning:
- Personality: trait theories usually differentiate between observable actions (surface traits) and a smaller number of underlying building blocks of personality (source traits, latent structure)
- Eysenck, Cattell, and the Five Factor Model
- Eysenck, orthogonal factor analysis, Extraversion and Neuroticism (and later Maleness/Psychoticism/Tough Mindedness)
- Cattell, oblique factor analysis, 16PF (15 source personality factors), 2nd order factors, Extraversion, Anxiety, Tough Poise, Independence
- Goldberg, common language analysis, the Big Five OCEAN (Openness to experience, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism
- Eysenck, Cattell, and the Five Factor Model
- Cognitive: models of intelligence
- little g: global adaptive capacity of the organism,
- Weschler, Verbal IQ, Performance IQ, Full Scale IQ
- Cattell, Fluid Intelligence (source), Crystallized Intelligence (learned knowledge, skills: surface trait)
- current WAIS-IV and WISC-V model: Verbal Comprehension, Perceptual Reasoning, Working Memory, Processing Speed, (Fluid Reasoning in WISC-V): FSIQ
- theories of multiple intelligences
- Motivation: are there inherent, organismic, universal psychological needs?
- Cattell, dynamic traits
- Maslow, hierarchy of motivation
- Self Determination Theory
- originally Autonomy and Competence (Deci & Ryan, 2000)
- Murray, universal basic needs (Primary) and environmental presses (environmental stimuli)
- Primary (viscerogenic) Needs: air, water, food, sentience, sex, expiration (CO2), urination, defecation, noxious stimulus avoidance, heat avoidance, cold avoidance, harm avoidance
- Secondary (psychogenic needs) Needs: 17 secondary psychological needs, grouped into 8 domains:
- Ambition (recognition, exhibition), Materialism (acquisition, conservance, order, retention, construction), Status (inviolacy, infavoidance, defendance, counteraction, seclusion), Power (dominance, deference, autonomy, contraiance, infavoidance), Sadomasochism (abasement, aggression), Social-Conformance (blame avoidance), Affection (affiliation, rejection, nurturance, succorance, play), Information (cognizance, exposition).
- no hierarchy among psychological needs
- needs vary among individuals (we all have some degree of each?)
- nomothetic (statistical) vs. ideographic (clinical) approaches to theory
- the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT), developed by Henrey Murray and Christiana Morgan, 32 cards, with standard testing utilizing 20
- scoring systems
Returning to the basic question is there a deep structure to human motivation, especially “psychological motivation”
- The critical role played by methodology (and theory) in approaching this question.
- projective personality tests
- implicit association tests
- The difference between a heuristic and a truth.
- Heuristics are simple strategies to process complex information and arrive at a decision or judgment. They may be useful under many circumstances and may be correct under many circumstances will not always be right and are usually open to certain types of errors.
- as if versus just so stories
- The difference between utility and a truth
- Heuristics are simple strategies to process complex information and arrive at a decision or judgment. They may be useful under many circumstances and may be correct under many circumstances will not always be right and are usually open to certain types of errors.
- Other views of a possible deep structure to human motivation:
- emotion
- emotions as “primitive” unlearned biologically based patterns
- emotions as learned, social based patterns
- neurological structures and circuits
- emotion