Applications in society

Attempts have been made in society to use motivational methods to achieve certain goals. In the control of animal behaviour, for example, it is clear that depriving an organism of food is a powerful means for accomplishing reinforcement. Appropriate use of food under these circumstances is an effective procedure for shaping an animal’s behaviour, maintaining it, and controlling the rate of its occurrence. Likewise, it is clear that animals have preferences (within, for example, the range of foodstuffs) and that their behaviour can be controlled with relatively greater effectiveness by the proper selection of preferred substances for use in training.

In many cultures, deprivation cannot be used so readily with human beings as it can be with other animals, although there are many human examples. Thus, some success has been reported in effecting desired behaviour in the classroom by depriving children of some of their recess time when they behave in ways deemed undesirable by the school authorities. Economies based on the use of tokens (e.g., poker chips) have been set up in schools, psychiatric hospitals, and institutions for retarded people. The result typically has been an improvement in the subjects’ behaviour and personal care and in the ease with which they may be managed. In such economies, tokens can be exchanged for privileges and commodities (e.g., candy and toys). The individual’s ability to obtain tokens is made contingent on socially desirable acts, such as making beds, being personally clean, being cooperative, and being generally acceptable to others. There have been reports of marked improvement in scholastic achievement among institutionalized juvenile delinquents who have been placed in such token economies.

The effectiveness of these and similar procedures has been most easily demonstrated in institutions, in which the situation permits a great deal of control over the subjects’ conditions of life and over their activities. In society at large, of course, this degree of control is effectively not feasible. There also are widely endorsed moral or ethical concerns about the desirability of instituting such control even if it were possible. The use of particular kinds of motivational devices in the control of human behaviour seems to many to be incompatible with the ethical idea of personal freedom and fraught with potential for immoral misuse in the hands of those who seek to manipulate others for ends that are politically or socially conformist.

On the other hand, it often is observed that many of society’s problems are motivational. This observation usually means that the goals and values of economically affluent groups in the Americas, Europe, and Asia are not shared by members of deprived urban populations or by millions of poor people in industrially less-developed countries. Or, it may mean that the goals of those who own or control profit-seeking enterprises (to make a product or deliver a service for the investors’ profit) are not shared by workers below the level of middle management. Many techniques have been tried in business and industry to effect so-called motivational involvement with production on the part of ordinary employees. Some of them have had success. Incentive systems, employee participation in company planning and decisions, and human-relations training exemplify the procedures used. A substantial corps of specialists throughout the world provides programs to industry designed to improve the motivation, morale, and satisfaction of workers at all levels. Although these programs have wide acceptance, most of them have received very little objective evaluation.

Summary

Motivation is a complex topic that spans virtually all areas of psychology. No one theory is capable of explaining all that we know about motivational processes. Some motives such as hunger, thirst, and sexual activity seem best understood from a biological viewpoint. Other motives appear to be learned, and such motives help to account for the diversity and complexity of human activities. Still other motives are influenced by the cognitive processes in which we engage. Our interpretation of the events around us influences our future motivation.

A complicating factor in human motivation is the fact that even basic motives are influenced by a variety of elements. For example, we may eat because of energy needs, but some people also eat when stressed or anxious, when depressed or alone, or because of social influences such as other people eating. The taste qualities of certain foods may also cause us to eat when not hungry. This interaction of many factors in determining the motivation of behaviour seriously hinders our ability to understand even basic motivational processes; the contribution of various motivational components must be carefully separated and analyzed. When the study of more subtle motives is attempted, these complicating factors hinder understanding even more. In spite of the large amount of information we have on motivation, much yet remains to be understood.