ALHT106 Lecture Notes - Lecture 4: Abraham Maslow, Goal Setting, Cognitive Model
Motivation
Lecture 1
• What is motivation
o Someone who has motive is to say they possess an internal state, the nature of
which is to compel them towards some new state of affairs
o May be called needs, wants, interests, yearnings, desires, etc.
o To be motivated is to exhibit goal-directed behaviour
o We attribute that possessing motives causes intentional action
o Two aspects
• The goal or object of motivation - the thing/state of affairs that one is seeking
to find, change or create
• The intensity of the want or need - typically experienced as urgency, agitation,
discomfort or pain
o Perspectives of motivation
• Psychodynamic (1890s) - distinguished between conscious (explicit) and
unconscious (implicit) motives
• Behaviourist (1920s) - asserts that humans are motivated to repeat
behaviours that lead to reinforcement and to avoid behaviours associated
with punishment
• Cognitive (1960s) - asserts that people are motivated to perform behaviours
that they value and that they believe they can attain
• Humanistic (1970s) - asserts a theory of self-actualisation: Maslow's hierarchy
of needs ranges from needs that are basic to survival to needs that guide
behaviour only once the person has fulfilled needs lower down the hierarchy
• Evolutionary (2000s) - asserts that evolution selects animals that maximise
their inclusive fitness
• Drive theories
o The earliest attempts to account for human motivations in less everyday
terminology trace back to Instinct Theories
o An instinct is a seemingly innate biological compulsion that prompts an organism to
manifest a specific unlearned action from that species' behavioural repertoire
o Instincts are typically conceived of as being reactive, almost reflex-like fixed action
patterns - a concept that does well in describing simple, specific animal behaviours
o Hard when applied to humans - vast variability and context sensitivity
o Drive theories - an internal regulatory control mechanism
o Postulated that what humans actually possess are a suite of conditional
mechanisms, which activate to compel particular types of behaviours when
biologically relevant survival needs were not being met
o The purpose of any given drive is to preserve homeostasis
• Concerns the identifying of an optimal state for a system, and performing
ongoing adjustments whenever the system deviates from it
• Typically through a negative-feedback loop which monitors the current state,
and counteracts any observed changes with opposing adjustments
o Drive theories postulate that all animals seek to maintain a psychological
homeostasis, wherein the detection of some fundamental need produces a specific
sense of subjective tension, discomfort or distress, that the organism seeks to
alleviate by seeking out a remedy to that need
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o Drives are thought to be directly connected to sensory apparatus that detect the
levels of some significant quantity, and become activated in proportion to any
deficiencies
o All drives are thought to become more intense with deprivation, and return to an
equilibrium when sated
o Psychodynamic drives
• Sigmund Freud - two essential drives
▪ Eros/Libido - the general drive to satisfy the visceral needs of the body,
through stimulation of the mouth (sustenance), anus (relief) and
genitals (sexuality, intimacy, belonging)
▪ Thanatos/Aggression - the drive for self-denial, mastery and control
over other urges
• Freud focused on how we cope when our desires cannot be easily fulfilled
• Identifies drives as emerging from the unconscious (subconscious) mind, so
their underlying logic is unknown to us, we know only how they feel
▪ Describes why we do not always understand why we want the things we
want (motives can be implicit or explicit), and introduces the notion that
we have to interpret our own drives in order to make sense of how best
to sate them
o Behaviourist
• Proposed a formal Drive Reduction Theory, based on the perception of
specific survival needs, which all produce a general sense of tension that the
organism is compelled to reduce
• Building upon learning theories, behaviourists theorised that organisms
possessed biologically determined primary drives, but through conditioning
could learn a range of secondary drives
▪ Primary - hunger, thirst, tiredness, loneliness, arousal
▪ Secondary - any initially neural stimuli could become a motivating,
secondary drive, as long as it predicts or is paired with primary drives
o Overall drive theories
• Unconsciously computed evaluations of need
• Emerge into awareness as feelings of tension/discomfort
• Are either biologically innate (primary) or learned via association (secondary)
o Arousal similar to drive theory
• Focuses only on the subjective sense of arousal/tension and our attempts to
keep it within an optimal range in different settings (homeostasis)
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