Motivation no relation Beliefs
Motivation is the reason for which humans and other animals initiate, continue, or terminate a behavior at a given time. Motivational states are commonly understood as forces acting within the agent that create a disposition to engage in goal-directed behavior. It is often held that different mental states compete with each other and that only the strongest state determines behavior. This means that we can be motivated to do something without actually doing it. The paradigmatic mental state providing motivation is desire. But various other states, such as beliefs about what one ought to do or intentions, may also provide motivation. Motivation is derived from the word 'motive', which denotes a person's needs, desires, wants, or urges. It is the process of motivating individuals to take action in order to achieve a goal. The psychological elements fueling people's behavior in the context of job goals might include a desire for money.
Various competing theories have been proposed concerning the content of motivational states. They are known as content theories and aim to describe what goals usually or always motivate people. Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of needs and the ERG theory, for example, posit that humans have certain needs, which are responsible for motivation. Some of these needs, like for food and water, are more basic than other needs, such as for respect from others. On this view, the higher needs can only provide motivation once the lower needs have been fulfilled. Behaviorist theories try to explain behavior solely in terms of the relation between the situation and external, observable behavior without explicit reference to conscious mental states.
Motivation may be either intrinsic, if the activity is desired because it is inherently interesting or enjoyable, or extrinsic, if the agent's goal is an external reward distinct from the activity itself. It has been argued that intrinsic motivation has more beneficial outcomes than extrinsic motivation. Motivational states can also be categorized according to whether the agent is fully aware of why he acts the way he does or not, referred to as conscious and unconscious motivation. Motivation is closely related to practical rationality. A central idea in this field is that we should be motivated to perform an action if we believe that we should perform it. Failing to fulfill this requirement results in cases of irrationality, known as akrasia or weakness of the will, in which there is a discrepancy between our beliefs about what we should do and our actions.
Research on motivation has been employed in various fields. In the field of business, a central question concerns work motivation, for example, what measures an employer can use to ensure that his employees are motivated. Motivation is also of particular interest to educational psychologists because of its crucial role in student learning. Specific interest has been given to the effects of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation in this field.Maslow's hierarchy of needs
Content theory of human motivation includes both Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of needs and Herzberg's two-factor theory. Maslow's thesis is based on the idea that we are driven by our basic human needs. Maslow's theory is one of the most widely discussed theories of motivation. Furthermore, if some of our most basic requirements are not addressed, we may be unable to advance and meet our other needs. Abraham Maslow believed that man is inherently good and argued that individuals possess a constantly growing inner drive that has great potential. The needs hierarchy system is a commonly used scheme for classifying human motives. Maslow's hierarchy of needs emphasizes certain characteristics like family and community that involve the needs to be met. The basic needs, safety, love and belonging, and esteem have to be met first in order for the individual to actually reach self-actualization. The needs can overlap within the pyramid, but the lower needs have to be met first in order to move up. Some basic needs can include food and shelter. The need of safety has to do with receiving protection. For the individual to feel love and belonging, they have to feel some type of attachment by giving and receiving love. Having competence and control in personal life has to do with meeting the need of esteem. Not being able to meet the lower and higher needs can have a detrimental effect on mental health. This could lead to symptoms of depression, and lower self-esteem during adolescent years. If safety needs are not met during adolescence, then the individual will have less confidence. A study found that just having support from the community, friends can lead to decreased emotional challenges. It is important to satisfy these needs in order to reduce emotional and mental challenges over time.Maslow (1954) developed the hierarchy of needs consisting of five hierarchic classes. According to Maslow, people are motivated by unsatisfied needs. The needs, listed from basic (lowest-earliest) to most complex (highest-latest), are as follows:
Physiology (hunger, thirst, sleep, etc.)
Safety/Security/Shelter/Health
Social/Love/Friendship
Self-esteem/Recognition/Achievement
Self-actualization/achievement of full potentialThe basic requirements build upon the first step in the pyramid: physiology. If there are deficits on this level, all behavior will be oriented to satisfy this deficit. Essentially, if someone has not slept or eaten adequately, they would not be interested in their self-esteem desires. Subsequently, people that have the second level, awakens a need for security and so on and so forth. After securing those two levels, the motives shift to the social sphere, the third level. Psychological requirements comprise the fourth level, while the top of the hierarchy consists of self-realization and self-actualization.
Maslow's hierarchy of needs theory can be summarized as follows:Unconscious
The conscious–unconscious distinction plays an important role in Sigmund Freud's psychoanalytical theories. According to him, the unconscious contains various repressed parts of the mind, like anxiety-inducing thoughts and socially unacceptable ideas. He identifies censorship as a force that keeps the repressed parts from entering consciousness. But unconscious instinctual impulses can nonetheless have a great influence on behavior in the form of unconscious motivation. When these instincts serve as a motive, the person is only aware of the goal of the motive, and not its actual source. Freud divides these instincts into sexual instincts, death instincts, and ego or self-preservation instincts. Sexual instincts are those that motivate humans to stay alive and ensure the continuation of mankind. On the other hand, Freud also maintains that humans have an inherent drive for self-destruction: the death instinct. Similar to the devil and angel that everyone has on their shoulder, the sexual instinct and death instinct are constantly battling each other to both be satisfied. The death instinct can be closely related to Freud's other concept, the id, which is our need to experience pleasure immediately, regardless of the consequences. The last type of instinct that contributes to motivation is the ego or self-preservation instinct. This instinct is geared towards assuring that a person feels validated in whatever behavior or thought they have. The mental censor, or door between the unconscious and preconscious, helps satisfy this instinct. For example, one may be sexually attracted to a person, due to their sexual instinct, but the self-preservation instinct prevents them to act on this urge until that person finds that it is socially acceptable to do so. Quite similarly to his psychic theory that deals with the id, ego, and superego, Freud's theory of instincts highlights the interdependence of these three instincts. All three serve as checks and balances system to control what instincts are acted on and what behaviors are used to satisfy as many of them at once.
Priming is another source of unconscious motivation. It is a phenomenon whereby exposure to one stimulus influences a response to a subsequent stimulus, without conscious guidance or intention. For example, when someone is exposed to the word "cancer", they are afterward less likely to smoke a cigarette offered to them. There are various forms of priming, but visual and semantic priming are the most relevant for motivation. Because of this link to external stimuli, priming is closely related to exposure theory, which states that people tend to like things that they have been exposed to before. This is used by advertising companies to get people to buy their products. In product placements in movies and TV shows, for example, we see a product in our favorite movie, which makes us more inclined to buy that product when we see it again. Another example comes from former drug users, who are more tempted to relapse when exposed to stimuli associated with the drug.
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