A Post-Rational Model of Behavior, part III: Motivation Motivation addresses the burning question “why?” in human behavior. Given its apparently central role in psychology and other behavioral sciences, there is a lot less settled than one would expect. There are several distinct perspectives in theory of motivation – all of which have predictive and explanatory power – but none of which at this time gives a really complete picture. This is perhaps because some influential early researchers trivialized motivation as “instinct” (Darwin and later behaviorists) or “libido and aggression” (Freud) or as “rational behavior.” Motivation is clearly rich and multi-faceted. One of the first modern treatments of motivation was by the pragmatist psychologist, William James. In his remarkable book “Principles of Psychology,” James created his own list of primitive motives, which were - Saving: the desire to hoard and collect - Construction: the desire to build - Curiosity: the desire to explore - Exhibition: the desire for attention - Family: the desire to nurture children - Hunting: the desire to find food - Order: the desire for cleanliness - Play: the desire for fun - Sex: the desire to reproduce - Shame: the desire to avoid attention - Pain: avoiding negative sensations - Herd: the desire for social contact - Vengeance: the desire for aggression This was a very significant first step, and many of these motives have been validated in experimental work later. Given the lack of empirical data that James had to work with, it has much in common with modern treatments. James’ work was ignored for much of early 20th century, a period dominated by Freud and behaviorism. Abraham Maslow was one of the first to break with these traditions and introduce a third “humanist” tradition to psychology. Maslow viewed needs as following a hierarchy. At the bottom are basic animal needs. As one moves up the hierarchy, the needs correlate with higher forms of “being.” Maslow claimed that deficits in lower-level needs captured people’s attention and energy and prevented them from focusing on the higher levels. self-actualizing: to fulfill oneself, to become all that one is capable of becoming. esteem: achievement, status, responsibility, and reputation. psychological: belonging, love, acceptance. safety: security, stability. physical: air, water, food, sleep Maslow studied healthy individuals with a variety of backgrounds (whereas much experimental work before focused on patients with psychological problems) and especially exceptional achievers. Albert Einstein was one of his subjects. He found correspondence with their levels of achievement and their dominant motives. While it lacks a strong empirical base, it has intuitive appeal and has been productively applied to improve motivation in practical settings (e.g. corporate environments). Maslow also introduced the notion of “peak experiences”: heightened states in which people feel more alive, self-satisfied andwhole. This idea was controversial at the time, but more recent studies of “flow” experiences in Mihaly Csikszentmihayli’s work have been very influential. Implicit and Explicit Motives Interest in professional motivation grew in the 1950’s and 60’s. The work context led to a focus on achievement motivation as its main subject. The seminal work in this area was McClelland, Atkinson, Clark and Lowell’s book The Achievement Motive [9] (see also [6] for a modern overview of work on achievement motivation). While this book laid the foundations of achievement motivation, the authors later developed methods to study three basic motives: n Achievement (meaning need for achievement), n Power and n Affiliation (need for social contact). One very important contribution of this work was its distinction between implicit and explicit (self-attributed) motives. Implicit motives seem to be innate, and influence behavior over the short and long term, e.g. individuals with a high power motive will continue seeking means to dominate others throughout their lives. But it cannot be assumed that these built-in motives will be consciously accessible to the subject. Explicit or self-attributed motives are the motive principles that the subject is aware of. They may have quite different triggers and consequences. McClelland later labeled the explicit versions of achievement, power and affiliation as san-achievement, san-power and san-affiliation, where san stands for self-attributed need. To get a handle on implicit motives, McClelland et al. use projective methods to establish implicit motives. The most familiar projective test is the Rorschach inkblot test. The Rorschach test has met with mixed professional acceptance, but another projective test called the TAT (Thematic Apperception Test) has been widely used and accepted. In a TAT test, subjects are shown ambiguous cartoon-like images of people and asked to write a story about what is going on in them. McClelland et al.’s version of this procedure became known as PSE (Picture Story Exercise). The PSE was very effective as an implicit motivation measure. That is, it predicted well subject’s performance on tasks that were enhanced by motivation. It also responded to external cues that stimulate particular motives. But it was slow and very labor-intensive to administer – interpreting the stories people told required very careful reading by coders using an elaborate grading system. And multiple coders were needed for each story to achieve reliable results. For this reason, there was a quest to develop questionnaires which exposed basic motives. Since the predictive value of McClelland’s three basic motives was already known, many of these questionnaires consciously sought to measure n-power, n-achievement and n-affiliation. Remarkably, virtually all of these questionnaires showed little or no correlation with PSE. In one meta-analysis [18] i.e. in a survey of many published papers, the author found that there was less than 3% shared variance between PSE scores and scores based on similar motives derived from questionnaires. It was not that the questionnaires were ineffective, it was found instead that the motive scores they were measuring were robust and had predictive value, but they had different behavioral triggers and consequences than implicit measures. The difference between implicit and explicit motives deserves further explanation. Both