When you really want something or someone, you are usually ‘motivated’ to actually get what you want. The word ‘motivation’ is therefore used in everyday language to indicate ‘how much’ someone wants something. In social psychology, the definition and use of the term motivation is somewhat more complex. In addition to feelings and knowledge, motivation is one of the things that ensures that we are the way we are and act the way we do. In this article I will discuss the (social) psychological definition of motivation and several important aspects of it.
Definition
Just like in everyday life, the basic social psychological definition of motivation is short and sweet: a force that moves people to behave in such a way that certain outcomes can be achieved, or in other words, wanting to do what is necessary to achieve your goals . Please note, it explicitly states wanting to do, after all, when we only talk about doing, we are talking about actual behavior. Motivation is a trigger for behavior, an urge, but not behavior itself.
Motivation for what?
Motivation always has a purpose. By a goal we mean a desired end state, something we want to achieve. Goals can be very grand and all-encompassing (for example, living a happy life) or very subtle (not eating fatty snacks for a day). The smaller goals are often sub-goals of larger goals. For example, not eating chips for a day can be a sub-goal of getting/maintaining a nice, slim body. This may perhaps be a sub-goal of a healthy and long life. Subgoals can also serve multiple higher goals. Staying slim can be useful for your health, but a second higher goal may be to be attractive to others (and thus land a rich man/woman!).
This may all sound very logical. Social psychologists, however, complicate this by making the following division: lower sub-goals – things that you do and achieve in daily life are simply called goals (goals, in English ). However, they call higher goals, such as healthy living, motives. These are often goals that have to do with social survival, such as status, family love, harmony, etc. Both motives and goals are outcomes that one strives for, and motivation is the drive to pursue them. The use of the word motivation and motives sometimes confuses some, but there is a significant difference!
Consciously or unconsciously
It was explained above that goals can exist at both sub-level and higher level. Goals, and the motivation to pursue them, can also occur at a conscious or unconscious level. Conscious goals are goals that we know about, such as when we choose not to eat chips because… However, unconsciously we also have goals, such as when we adopt a protective tone when someone criticizes us or a close family member. The behavior may be visible, but the underlying goal (protecting your own ego or your family) is often not fully conscious. When someone criticizes us, we usually don’t think, hey, this person has just damaged my self-esteem. I will now try to refute his criticism to repair the damage.
Conscious goals are usually goals that require attention. Constant consideration of the goal, where we are now and where we need to go to approach the goal is then part of our behavior. Again, motivation is the driving force behind this process: we want to achieve our goal, so we want to exhibit such and such behavior. On the other hand, some behaviors resulting from motivation to achieve goals can also be automatic, such as the defense we described above, resulting from criticism. Because we only have a limited amount of attention to spare, the human mind is very good at automating behavior. We often start something with the explicit (conscious) motivation to achieve a (conscious) goal, but after many repetitions of certain behavior to achieve that goal, we automate it. We then experience less conscious urge to achieve the goal, but we still do the right behavior (this automating of behavior is not always useful or desirable!). This is an excellent example for people who drive a car: the first time you got into a car and drove away, you were probably very conscious of taking the right actions to achieve your goal (getting home safely or impress the driving instructor). Over time, most actions, such as clutching, braking and accelerating, become automatic. You are hardly aware of these behaviors, nor of the immediate goals behind them (e.g., behavior: pressing the brakes, goal: stopping before the red light).
Motivation and willpower
Some motivation comes without trying. For example, most people experience the very simple motivation for eating, for social behavior, and for avoiding dangerous situations. These are all motivations for goals that have to do with survival. Other goals, however, can sometimes be more difficult to muster motivation for. Few students have the motivation or urge to study for an exam. In precise social-psychological terms we are talking about intrinsic motivation versus extrinsic motivation. More about this in the article ‘intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation’. In this article we keep it (relatively) simple: some goals require self-control and willpower to generate the motivation for them.
Like muscles, a person’s willpower is an exhaustible source of energy. When you use your willpower for one goal, you have less left for other goals. So when you have pushed yourself hard to study for an exam, you no longer have the strength to resist the temptation of cookies; the behavior of snacking while learning is a well-known phenomenon among most students…
Motivation for learning. Not everything we do or do not do is something we are ‘intrinsically’ motivated for. Extrinsic motivation happens through a process of learning. Behaviorism within social psychology has developed a certain view on this – although certainly not the only view possible! Their idea of operant conditioning goes as follows: when you are repeatedly punished or rewarded for certain behavior, you become ‘motivated’ to stop or repeat that behavior. Think of ice cream (my favorite example). When you eat an ice cream you are rewarded with its delicious taste (I recommend vanilla!). This reward results in your motivation to eat ice cream again next time. Vice versa of course applies to punishments, for example the punishment ‘eating Brussels sprouts’!
Conclusion:
We humans are motivated beings: we do things because we feel the urge to do them to achieve our goals. Pursuing goals is sometimes automatic and unconscious, but sometimes it is also conscious and requires concentration and attention. Sometimes it comes naturally and sometimes it requires willpower.