What is Motivation?
Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock. Oh how the time passes as we scroll on TikTok. That may not be the pastime for everyone but we have all found ourselves in the midst of some activity where we stop and wonder “What am I doing?” Perhaps you should be working on that paper or studying for an exam or cleaning your place or any number of other activities. So, why are we on TikTok or YouTube instead of tending to our other responsibilities? Why do we have those responsibilities any way? Why don’t I love my job or my class? Why would I rather be with friends right now? Why? WHY? WHY?!?!
The “why?” of human behavior is at the center of motivational science. In this field, researchers are working to distill the processes and factors that influence what people do and feel. Of course, humans are complex so this area also must consider how people eat and sleep and think and everything else that makes a body go. My goal in this article is to outline some of the big areas in motivational science to help our readers understand some of the perspectives offered in the other articles on this site. I’ll summarize them into five main points.
People are always motivated to do something.
Despite how it may seem when we plop onto the couch after a busy day, we are never “not motivated.” Choosing to do “nothing” is still a motivated choice. For that to make sense, we should probably establish what is meant by “motivation.”
Motivation is the collection of internal processes related to initializing, sustaining, or stopping a behavior.This definition is intentionally broad. It includes the typical behaviors we associate with “being motivated,” such as exercising, studying, and seeking out new experiences. It also includes those behaviors we associate with being “not motivated,” such as watching TV, staring out of the window, and sleeping. One may suppose that a person is completely lacking motivation when they are no longer conscious, but it may be more apt to say that individuals are amotivational when they can no longer impact their body or other people through their actions. That is, we may not be conscious of the motivations and the planning of our behaviors, but they still count as part of our motivational architecture.
We have multiple motivations all the time.
We can really only carry out one task or behavior at a time, but our brains are planning out many different possible movements that we could enact (Schaller et al., 2017). Each of these movement plans is created in reaction (or rather, in prediction) to events occurring inside and outside of our bodies. For example, your hypothalamus may detect that the salt concentration in your body is a little high and thus sends a signal to your insular cortex, which is associated with a feeling of thirst. Your brain starts to activate a behavior plan to lift the glass of water from the table to your mouth. Simultaneously, you’re in the middle of sending a text message to your friend. Do you stop tapping your keyboard to take a drink? In this simple situation, we can see competing motivations.
This can easily be expanded to any number of possible motivations in a given moment. Here is a familiar scenario for students. Your are tired because you’ve stayed up late the last few nights. You’re motivated to lay still in the dark on a nice comfy bed. You’re not doing that, though. Instead, you’re finishing a paper for your English class that is due tomorrow. As you stare, blurry-eyed, at your computer screen, your phone buzzes with a new notification. Your motivation switches from figuring out what your next sentence will be to reading that your friend from high school is in town and wants to hang out. You feel a need to reconnect with your friend. You feel a need to be successful in school. You feel a need to go to bed. How can we ever choose what to do? Maybe we don’t have to put much thought into these choices. Maybe our choices are easier than we think.
Motivation is a mind and body phenomenon.
When you haven’t had food for 6 hours, how do you feel? That is, when your body has been deprived of new nutrients for an extended period of time, what is your experience? We often label that experience as “hunger.” When we are in that experience, we start food seeking and food consuming behaviors. We don’t “choose” to be hungry. That motivation to get food arises out of what we are; out of how we are constructed.
As Lisa Feldman Barrett (2020) writes in her book, 7 ½ Lessons about the Brain, our brains have evolved to predict how the world and our own movements will impact our energy stores. That is, humans (and other complex animals with brains), are like chief financial officers with a set of market analytical tools. Any change in the business or the market will have implications for the bottom line and there is an appropriate plan of action. From this neurobiological evolutionary perspective, everything we do can be traced back to keeping our body alive.
Of course, we can also appreciate the times when our motivation seems to go way beyond some physiological constraints. For example, choosing what we want to do with our lives. Knowing that we need some source of income to provide food and shelter may stem easily enough from some basic physiological needs, but deciding if to be a doctor or a musician or a teacher or an engineer or any other profession is shaped by more than just keeping our bodies alive.
Our motivation is a product of the past, the present, and the future.
How one spends their time, the goals they pursue, the tasks they avoid, may be hard to predict at any moment for any person. After all, everyone is always motivated (point 1), we have competing, simultaneous motivations (point 2), and we are directed by unobservable internal physiological and mental processes (point 3). However, we can see some through lines in our motivational arcs.
The newborn brain does have some basic structures and wiring set at birth, but you can think of that as the outline on a coloring page. The particular details of the image are determined by what colors that page. Just like a coloring page may be completed with different media (i.e., crayons, colored pencils, acrylic paint, pastels, etc.) and any number of color combinations, so to are each of our brains uniquely wired. Furthermore, our brain wiring never stops changing until we die.
The interplay of nature (how the brain works) and nurture (the experiences that change our wiring) is at the heart of this developmental arc in motivation. We start by being motivated to do the behaviors to get the basics that keep us alive in the moment. That means mostly crying for food, cleanings, and warmth, but eye-contact while feeding helps to keep those caregivers coming back. As our bodies and brains develop the ability to move about the world, we learn what gives us more of those good things (i.e., safety, food, drink, social connection), and what leads to bad things (i.e., pain, hunger, social isolation). That which we learn from previous experiences influences what we do in the present and helps us to set our goals and ambitions for the future.
Implicit motives illustrate this well. According to this perspective, people have differing motivational strengths for the need to achieve, the need for power, and the need for affiliation and intimacy. Furthermore, our motivations for these may not be consciously accessible (Asma, 2023). Take a guess at which professions may score high on a need for power. Did you guess elementary school teacher? These individuals are in a profession in which they yield a lot of influence on the lives of others. Of course, they are pursuing this for noble outcomes, but it is a powerful position nonetheless. But why choose teaching to fulfill that need? Why have that need at all? The answers are specific to the person. However, the strength of the need is influenced by our previous experiences, starting in early childhood. The way we meet this need is learned over the span of our lives. As such, someone with a high need for power may have felt gratified when giving direction to little ones. This then helped them to set the goal of becoming an educator. This goal then establishes some framework for many of the choices they will make in the future. Of course, our lives are always subject to change.
Motivation is malleable.
The most important point to know about motivation is that it changes. These changes have some guardrails set by out biology and some basic needs based on what we are as a species, but our motivations for what we do or don’t can change. That does not mean that we need not be passive in receiving these changes. That is, we can be architects of our motivations by incrementally changing what it is that we do and like. Think of behavior and motivation as a cycle. Our motivation influences our behavior and our behavior influences our motivation. If we can change a behavior, we can change how we think about what we do, how we feel, and ultimately, who we are.
This has been shown in the research on mindsets. Individuals can be described as having a fixed mindset or a growth about their abilities in certain aspects of their lives. A fixed mindset is shown when people think that their abilities are set and that their efforts to improve those abilities are wasted. Any outcome is a reflection of their unchanging abilities rather than how hard they work. Growth mindsets are the opposite. Individuals with this mindset see their abilities are changeable and that their effort has a direct impact on their growth. If they get some negative feedback, they are more likely to think that they can work to get better. Here’s the best part: people can change their mindset through experience (Yeager et al., 2019). By focusing on small, incremental changes in an ability, your motivation to work through setbacks will increase.
A little knowledge can have a large impact on shaping our motivation. This article is just a primer. Please read the other great articles written by SVSU students for SVSU students.
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