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The language of motivation is a workaday device for all of us in our social world. We speak of aims, purposes, desires, wants, needs, and compulsions in others and use the same language in testifying about ourselves. The language is descriptive, unqualified, contradictory, and misleading. It manifestly will not do for science, and yet, in a pragmatic fashion, we get it to work much of the time in our daily lives. For better or for worse, it has been the departure point for the development of scientific statements about human motivation.
From the outset, systematic writing about human motivation has had to accommodate the fact that our subjective sense of intention is an unreliable index of our behavior. Many behaviors show intentional organization which may be successfully identified by the observer when the behaving person himself cannot report or infer the intention. Efforts to cope with this feature of human motivation have led to a wide range of strategies of theorizing which, in turn, have stimulated rather distinctive styles of research tactics. One result of this state of affairs is that there is not yet any general theory of human motivation, nor does it seem likely that there will be one for quite some time. Let the reader thus be prepared for a certain amount of surveying here, with a special effort to mark numerous reference signs pointing to those sizable nexuses of literature which must be pursued in depth. (For a more ex-tended survey, see Murphy 1954.)
Textbook treatments of social motivation from various viewpoints may be found in recent texts by Atkinson (1964), Brown (1961), and Gofer and Appley (1964). Atkinson provides an excellent historical review of the manner in which the framing of motivational questions has evolved and suggests an essentially cognitive resolution; Brown’s book treats the topic from the point of view of Hullian drive theory, with its resultant absorption of motivational questions into the analysis of habit systems; while Gofer and Appley give an exhaustive and eclectic summary of the motivational literature, culminating in the suggestion that research will be best guided by an “equilibration” model focusing on the anticipation and/or sensitization invigoration mechanisms.
In these modern treatments of motivation, the fact of socialization is acknowledged but not given any special status beyond that given other sources of stimulus input. The same is true of the response concept, in which no qualitative distinction is made between subjective report and observed behavior. The effect of this sort of theorizing is to place the burden for distinguishing social classes of stimuli and responses upon spatial location, timing, intensity, association, and complexity. The power of such an approach lies in its reductionist implications, since the observer must give up his “area” terms, such as love, anxiety, ambition, etc., in favor of a step-by-step analysis of the motivated sequence. Such is the approach of Ford and Beach (1951) in describing the pre-conditions, body states, arousing stimuli, and preparatory, consummatory, and withdrawal movements which characterize sexual behavior across species, including man.
The limitations of the reductionist approach have been obvious for decades. McDougall (1908) warned against them and tried to provide an alternative that would preserve the value of social motivation in our common vocabulary. Contemporary writers have also pointed up the severe limitations of reducing the study of motivation to those behavioral sequences which focus on action “in order to” at the expense of action for its own sake of “being.” Gordon Allport (1964) has reiterated his often expressed evaluation of theory and research unenlightened by a proper degree of eclecticism. When we add to these considerations the problems posed by the desire of many to write a truly social psychology of motivation—for example, Floyd All-port and Kurt Lewin—we must be prepared to find the literature of the field a disordered array of constructs, theories, methods, empirical findings, and research programs. There is a sense in which constructs and theories are answers to questions posed by observation. What are the origins of human motives? How do motives develop? What are the motives of men? How do motives affect behavior and experience? By organizing the remainder of this article around these questions, we will be surveying the literature on human social motivation.
Nearly all serious observers of human behavior have had to frame a statement about the sources and wellsprings of motivated behavior. The early works of McDougall (1908), Freud (1915), and Thorndike (1927) use extensions of the philosophical discussions of hedonism and the role played by the affective dimensions of experience. The general notion is that those behaviors which result in changes in affect soon take on directional qualities, while those which have no observable affective components are not properly called motivational. However, both the Freudian postulation of unconscious affects and the difficulties of objective measurement of affects soon led to a willingness to assert that basic motivational tendencies may emerge as a natural component of behavior in the normal course of maturational development (e.g., White 1959). Gordon Allport has extended this position by postulating that new motives may develop from old by becoming “functionally autonomous” that is, early motives produce a profusion of new experiences which transform and redirect them. Jung (1932-1936) extended the maturational change through the life span well beyond the middle years and asserted that new motives continue to appear late in life.
Learning theorists have progressively shown more interest in objective determinants of behavior. The two major research programs have been those of Clark Hull and B. F. Skinner [seeHull; Learning, article oninstrumental learning]. By emphasizing the role of response consequences (“reinforcers”) in learning and the directing influence of stimuli associated with reinforcement, they reduced the motivational bases of behavior to those primary bodily conditions which drive the organism to a sufficient level of arousal to support learning. Thus Brown (1961) argues that all social motivation is based upon primary drive systems that have been elaborated by reinforcement into secondary systems.
The effect of these formulations has been to focus attention on the definition of primary systems. It is an empirical fact that hunger, thirst, pain, and affective arousal surrounding those body systems eventually integrated into adult sexuality have proved easiest to observe and manipulate. But other researchers, such as Sears, Maccoby, and Levin (1957), have demonstrated the feasibility of empirical studies of those systems devoted to cognition, mastery, empathy, and identification of value orientations. These “ego functions,” as they are called, appear to be equally primary in driving the organism. Indeed, the difficulties of specifying the attributes of primary drive systems lend force to the models emerging in the discussions between psychologists and ethologists about the proper method of study of emergent patterns of behavior. Here we are warned against placing too much value on “area” terms such as “drive,” “primary,” etc., in favor of providing a closely specified, objective description of the sequence of events, both organismic and environmental, which contribute to the appearance of a behavior sequence (Bindra 1959). As this advice is more widely adopted, it appears likely that the origin of social motivation will be described as some unique arrangement of determinants known to characterize social motivation throughout the life span.
The earliest comprehensive statement of motivational development is Freud’s theory of psychosexual stages (1932), wherein intense affects of pleasure and distress progressively focus on the emerging body functions of ingestion, elimination, and orgasm, as well as on fantasied castration threat. These maturational stages have been further supplemented by Erikson’s “epigenetic ages” (1950), which emphasize psychosocial stages of development of trust, autonomy, initiative, industry, identity, intimacy, generativity, and ego integrity. Jung also conceives of psychological stages extending through the life span. The social factor in each of these schemes lies in the association of gratification or fear with other persons, acting within the area of interest to the developing human being. Since the focus is on the growing person, the “other” tends to be treated as an object or agent, and the sense of reciprocity found in social psychology is absent.
Also absent from the above formulations is a closely reasoned theory of learning. McClelland (1951) has presented a discussion of the importance of the first years of life in the formation of motives which points toward the objective analysis of those conditions of early environmental input, autonomic conditioning, undeveloped cognitive discrimination, absence of symbolic control, and failure of extinction due to the unreproducibility of the original learning situations. Recently more precise statements of early learning of social motives have been set out by Staats and Staats (1963), Bijou and Baer (1961), and Bandura and Walters (1963). The first two pairs of authors use recent developments in Skinnerian analysis of behavior to effect an exposition of the emergence of directed behavior according to the pattern of classical conditioning of “respondents,” reinforcement schedules of “operants,” use of “discriminant” stimuli, and eventual symbolization of such stimuli. From this point of view, motives appear because some stimuli and reinforcers are more common than others and are easier to discriminate and of greater importance to society. Important issues remain untouched in this analysis. The defining attributes of reinforcers, beyond their capacity to reinforce, go unanalyzed, thus placing a heavy environmental emphasis on the theory and separating it from the research discussed in the previous section on origins of motivation. The loss of objectivity which occurs when the child masters sufficient language to permit the chief dynamics of reinforcement and discrimination to take place as thought and decision points to the need for a theory of language, and the Skinnerian efforts in this direction have suffered heavy criticism as being too simplistic. Finally, the value of these theories in generating research on the development of motives remains to be seen. As yet the presentations are descriptive and largely speculative, being reminiscent of a previous effort by E. R. Guthrie [see GUTHRIE]. Judging by the capacity of such theory to stimulate research and by some of the preliminary efforts, considerable research will be produced.
Bandura and Walters (1963) write from the sociobehavioristic viewpoint and present a considerable array of research findings in support of their theorizing. They emphasize the importance of social imitation and vicarious reinforcement, that is, change in behavior through observing the reinforcement experience of another. By combining the effects of imitative experience with direct social reinforcement, they show that social learning may involve sudden “mastery” of whole patterns of behavior in brief periods of time. They further theorize that the establishment of behavior patterns of aggression, dependence, sexual behavior, and self-control follows directly from patterns of reinforcement and stimulus generalization. However, the inhibition of these behaviors by socially acceptable alternative behaviors requires a combination of reinforcement withdrawal, modeling of alternative responses by others, and perhaps cessation of punishment following a restitutive or prosocial response. Punishment alone is said to inhibit the expression of the response in the presence of the punishing agent, but nothing more. This monograph is an excellent example of the behaviorist’s art of analyzing a behavioral sequence into those components of stimuli, responses, and environmental events for which reasonable estimates of relationship can be made.
There is the usual behavioristic sense of circumvention of the private, subjective interior of human experience in this writing, although Bandura and Walters devote considerable attention to learned verbal responses. “In contrast, a child may learn to criticize himself for transgression because self-criticism proved a successful means of securing the reinstatement of his parents’ affection and approval. In this case, the child’s behavior parallels that of an animal who learns to press a mildly charged lever in order to obtain food” (1963, pp. 186–187). The subjective sense of conflict, discrimination, interpretation, and decision—to say nothing of aspiration and purpose—continues to await an adequate theory of reinforcement. [SeeImitation.]
Standing in sharp contrast to the behavioristic approach is the work of McClelland in The Achieving Society (1961). He, too, attempts to trace the development of motivation, in this case the achievement motive, through an interlocking set of studies designed to focus on the value and meaning of various reinforcement situations as they impinge on the child. The emphasis is on the way parents interpret problem, work, and play situations to the child; on the problem-solving strategies of aspiration and effort which children adopt (Heckhausen 1963); on the effects of such experience as reflected in fantasy, self-evaluation, and choice of long-term interests; and on the eventual appearance in the adult personality of a coherent motivational system that continues to affect decision processes, performance characteristics, and belief systems. Such a program suffers from confusion of definitions, argument by analogy, numerous inade- quate controls, and poorly defined construct validity. Its value lies in its holding close to the phenomenal world of the subject, as experienced, in the hope of laboriously introducing those methods uniquely required for the proper study of human motivation. [SeeAchievement motivation.]
The literature on anxiety undoubtedly exceeds that on any other motivational topic. It may be divided into studies of physiological processes, case studies, field studies, and laboratory studies of the effects of anxiety on behavior and experience, assessments of therapeutic procedures for its relief, and theoretical statements on its origin, nature, and role in personality functions. Psychopathology, work loss and impairment, much of the thematic content of contemporary works of art, and the focus of social commentary in both popu- lar and scholarly writing all give testimony to the presence of anxiety in human affairs. Again, how-ever, as with sex, we find a discursive literature remarkably deficient in programmatic intent and lacking in coherence. Hoch’s assertions of 1950 remain true:
Today we know a great deal about where and when anxiety occurs, but we are still quite hazy as to how it originates and even what purpose it serves. . . . Some think that anxiety is secondary to an intraorganismic or interorganismic imbalance, being a symptom of a disturbed homeostasis in the organism due to conflicting drives within the individual and the environment; others support the point of view that anxiety itself is the cause of the disturbances we see in most neurotic and in some psychotic manifestations. (Hoch & Zubin 1950, p. 105)
The physiological mechanisms are outlined in the work of Selye (1956) on the “general adaptation syndrome,” in Wolff (1953), and in papers delivered at the Symposium on Stress, held in 1953 by the National Research Council and Walter Reed Army Medical Center. The Funkenstein, King, and Drolette (1957) experimental studies of induced stress as it affects physiological and psychological indices reveal the complexity of individual mastery of stressor effects and their attendant anxiety. Janis’ strategies (1958) for testing specific hypotheses of anxiety control in preoperative and postoperative patients stand as an excellent example of the careful field studies that are so badly needed. [SeeAnxiety; Stress.]
An excellent example of the successful researching of a motivational process is found in Berkowitz’ Aggression. By integrating his own research with the large body of material available, he was able to conclude:
. . . the habitually hostile person is someone who has developed a particular attitude toward large segments of the world about him. He has learned to interpret (or categorize) a wide variety of situations and/or people as threatening or otherwise frustrating to him. Anger is aroused when these interpretations are made, and the presence of relevant cues—stimuli associated with the frustrating events—then evokes the aggressive behavior. In many instances the anger seems to become “short-circuited” with continued repetition of the sequence so that the initial thought responses alone elicit hostile behavior. (1962, p. 258-259)
Thus a motive component surrounds the experience of threat, while the notion of latent aggression or need for aggression is abandoned in favor of a trait conception of more or less consistent aggressive reactions. However, Berkowitz clearly states that enduring motives may conflict with or support the aggressive response to threat as well as lie at the seat of the developmental course which leads to the aggressive personality pattern.
Berkowitz’ findings probably have great generality for other motivational systems. By tracing the relative weights of the various sources of variance as they are found in capacity for emotional arousal, constitutional capability, early models for action and thought, social settings of support or inhibition, and the structure of interiorized moral standards, he has doubtless identified the basic sources of many important motivational systems. Not that the scheme is yet complete. Notably absent from the work is a treatment of the middle and late life changes which occur presumably from self-education, shifts in ideology, and a steadily lengthening course of experience. This deficit is a common one in the works we are reviewing. [SeeAggression.]
“Ludic behavior consists in large measure of what we are calling perceptual and intellectual activities—seeking out particular kinds of external stimulation, imagery, and thought” (Berlyne 1960, p. 5). There is a growing body of literature concerned with exploratory behavior, curiosity, manipulation, attention, and epistemic behavior. It is paralleled in the clinical literature by an increased emphasis on the analysis of ego functions. Berlyne’s works (1960; 1965) constitute an impressive review of the studies of animals and men engaged in ludic behaviors. He suggests that exploration may be released by some specific stimulus event in the situation or may emerge from an ultrastable stimulus situation in an apparent effort to create “diversive” stimulation. Given these basic motivational dispositions, the processes of socialization, reinforcement, etc. may then produce more stable response patterns which are placed in the service of conflict reduction; these in turn lead to generalized epistemic behaviors de-signed to provide information and understanding suitable for adjustment to a wide range of choice and conflict situations. Thus ludic behaviors are usually found concurrently with the activation of other motivational systems, but they are distinct processes in their own right and not merely vari-ants of anxiety, aroused drive states, etc. Thus far this research has not attempted to provide standardized measures of individual differences in ludic motivation. [SeeCreativity; Stimulation DRIVES.]
The complexity of human social attachments naturally leads to attempts to distinguish between the qualities of human association. The voluminous clinical and psychoanalytic literature on psychosexual development has generated numerous hypotheses about the sources of attraction, dependence, love, and identity between per- sons. For several years Sears and his associates have been studying the development of affiliative tendencies in children (Sears et al. 1957; Sears 1963). “For the child, the upshot of this infantile experience is that a certain number of operant responses become firmly established to the various instigators that have been commonly associated with primary gratifications or reinforcing stimuli. The child learns to ‘ask” for the mother’s reciprocal behavior. These asking movements are the dependency acts whose frequency and intensity we use as a measure of the dependency trait (or action system)” (Sears 1963, p. 31). It is the appearance, maintenance, growth, and elaboration of these dependency acts that concern Sears, and his studies demonstrate the complexities of tracing these processes. Thus for the sample of four-year-olds for whom data on early infancy was available, the prediction of negative or positive attention-seeking, touching or holding, being near, and seeking reassurance proved to differ for the sexes, with the girls’ patterns related to level of maternal care, achievement demands, and sex anxiety for the father. Maternal coldness, slackness of standards, and neglect, without any real permissiveness, and paternal general nonpermissiveness—especially about sex— was related to boys’ dependency (Sears 1963, p. 63). Sears is willing to refer to these patterns as motivational systems, but he makes it clear that the sheer complexity of variables requires more precise definition than a list of needs or motives can provide. It is perhaps for this reason that individual difference measures of the dependency disposition are not reported.
Shipley and Veroff (1952) have established a reliable measure of need for affiliation (n Aff), using the modified Thematic Apperception Test procedure of McClelland. For college student populations in particular, this measure has shown predicted positive relationship to suggestions for conformity (Walker & Heyns 1962), negative subjective reactions to rejection (Hardy 1957), and effort on achievement tasks when they are instrumental to social approval (French 1958), to cite a few salient findings. These studies have been primarily aimed at establishing the construct validity of the n Aff measure and do not constitute a comprehensive study of affiliative behavior.
Schachter (1959) set out to study the conditions which cause variation in affiliative action. It has been demonstrated that affiliative tendencies increase with increasing anxiety and hunger and that, for anxiety, ordinal position of birth is an effective discriminator of the magnitude of the affiliative tendency. The over-all findings warrant the conclusion that affiliative tendencies are a manifestation of needs for anxiety reduction and self-evaluation (Schachter 1959, p. 132). Here we have an example of motive assignment from the observer’s interpretation of the situation, supported by subjective report of the subjects.
Approval and ingratiation. A comprehensive program of research on affiliative behavior is found in The Approval Motive by Douglas P. Crowne and David Marlowe (1964). Starting with an interest in a measure of individual differences in the social-desirability response set to personality inventory items,
. . . we directed our search toward the goals and expectations that would impel one to evaluate himself in terms conditioned by the acceptance of others. To do so required us to postulate a motivational state [the approval motive], reflected in test-taking behavior [the Marlowe-Crowne Social Desirability Scale (MC)], and to seek its correlates in behaviors less harassed by the confusions of personality tests. Our findings have been confirmative, although in the process a major alteration of the concept of the approval motive—the defensiveness-and-vulnerable-self-esteem hypothesis—was necessary to account for some unanticipated and initially paradoxical results. (1964, p. 206)
In this case the authors did find a significant correlation (+.55) between the projective n Aff score and the MC score, whose high scorers are
. . . more conforming, cautious, and persuasible, and [whose] behavior is more normatively anchored. . . . The greater amenability to social influence of persons who characterize themselves in very desirable terms is seen in (a) the f avorability of their attitudes toward an extremely dull and boring task; (b) their greater verbal conditionability, both directly and vicariously; (c) social conformity; (d) a tendency to give popular word associations; (e) the cautious setting of goals in a risk-taking situation; (f) their greater reactivity . . . in a ... perceptual-defense task; and (g) susceptibility to persuasion. (1964, p. 190)
These authors chose to keep the concept “approval motive” while finding it useful, as did Schachter, to postulate underlying motivation to maintain and preserve self-esteem. Thus we see the manner in which the hierarchy of social motives must be uncovered by a coherent program of research.
The same experience is reported by Jones (1964). He reports a series of studies using instructional and situational manipulation designed to reveal the extent and variety of ingratiation behaviors as well as effects on attitudes, beliefs, and perceptions, especially as they focus on self-esteem. Given instructional or situational sets to enhance ingratiation behavior, subjects (a) emphasize their positive attributes over their weaknesses, (b) move toward greater public agreement with a target person’s stated opinions, and (c) show an adaptive capacity for adjusting these actions to the status, awareness of the target of the subject’s intentions, and requirements of the mutual task.
Each of these monographs approaches the affiliative process in particular response domains, demonstrates some of the determinants of the behaviors, and finds it useful to infer a generalized disposition having motivational properties. The data suggest that at the center of affiliative behavior lies a concern for self-confirmation, enhancement, esteem, or maintenance, which itself may imply a more basic personality disposition to stabilize, order, and control changes in one’s position in the world.
A considerable part of one’s life-time is devoted to the performance of tasks whose outcomes provide important consequences for survival, well-being, social rewards, and self-esteem. Clearly understood standards of performance exist for these tasks, and to match or surpass the norm is considered an achievement. Murray gave the following definition of need Achievement (n Ach): “To accomplish something difficult. To master, manipulate, or organize physical objects, human beings, or ideas. To do this as rapidly and as independently as possible. To overcome obstacles and attain a high standard. To excel one’s self. To rival and surpass others. To increase self-regard by the successful exercise of talent”(Explorations in Personality . . . 1938, p. 164).
In 1953 McClelland, Atkinson, Clark, and Lowell published The Achievement Motive—which presented a projective measure of n Ach, defined now as concern with success in competition with some standard of excellence—and a series of studies de-signed to establish the construct validity of the measure. This work was followed by Atkinson’s Motives in Fantasy, Action, and Society (1958), which contains further studies of n Ach as well as new projective scoring systems for n Sex, n Power, and n Aff. McClelland’s Achieving Society (1961) and Heckhausen (1963) have provided still more research and theory about the achievement motive and its avoidance opposite, fear of failure. The continuously growing body of literature is the subject of reviews by Heckhausen (1965) and Birney (1966) and a collection of papers edited by Atkinson and Feather (1966).
The body of knowledge growing out of this sustained research effort has slowly taken the following shape. The child’s early efforts to master his world provide the parents with the opportunity to reward independent, self-propelled actions differentially. If such rewards come early in life and are accompanied by maternal praise and pacing and supportive paternal endorsement, task situations become the cue for realistic aspirations, capacity for delayed gratification, fantasies of success, and the desire for personal responsibility. These preferences lead to realistic occupational aspirations emphasizing moderate risks and personal freedom of decision. Authoritarian work situations are avoided and resisted, and these may include highly demanding academic situations. Vocational careers are marked by upward mobility, preference for moderate-risk business and managerial situations, and concentration on the instrumentalities of working situations.
It might be pointed out that this pattern of entrepreneurial features was not initially anticipated by the researchers, being only slowly understood as numerous studies showed that high task achievement did not necessarily denote a high need for achievement in most subjects. By focusing on the motivation measure, rather than on achieving behavior, the form of the motivational system has emerged.
This review of systematic studies of human motive systems illustrates the current phase of research now being pursued by persons interested in the identification, measurement, and functional properties of important social motives. Whether Murray’s list of motives proves prophetic remains to be seen. As more of these systems are understood, the opportunity for writing a general theory of human motivation will arise. Whether that theory will resemble the many restrictive models of action and behavior also remains to be seen. At the present it appears that human motives play their major role in sensitizing persons to environmental possibilities, directing their choice among incentives, contributing to both their degree of involvement in the situation and their phenomenal sense of it, and ordering the sense of closure and history surrounding the past sequence of events. So long as these aspects of life remain denotable, the motive construct will retain its usefulness.