• HOW NATURAL INCENTIVES INFLUENCE THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE HUNGER MOTIVE

Much has been learned about the factors that affect eating in animals and humans. The purpose of this chapter is not to review all this knowledge, but to learn from it as much as we can about the way motives develop out of sign Stimuli and the behavior they release, or what we have called natural incentives. The advantage of using hunger as the model for this purpose is that everyone agrees that some of the sign Stimuli involved produce innate affects and that enough research has been done on eating in animals and humans to show how motives might develop out of these innate affects through learning.

To oversimplify somewhat, three types of sign Stimuli influence eating: (1) sign Stimuli arising from nutritional deficiency, particularly low levels of available blood sugar (Mayer, 1955; Mayer & Marshall, 1956), which increase eating; (2) sign Stimuli arising from the palatability or tastiness of food; and (3) sign Stimuli arising from satiety, such as a full stomach or high blood sugar level, which decrease eating. Ordinarily the mechanisms involved operate automatically to make sure the body has enough energy (represented as available blood sugar) to do its work.

• ANALYZING THE REASONS FOR THE GROWTH AND DECLINE OF CIVILIZATIONS

Cultures, like individuals, differ greatly not only from each other, but from themselves at different moments in time. Some are peaceful, others aggressive; some rich, some poor; some expansive and mobile, others stay-at-home. Anthropologists, historians, economists, political scientists, and philosophers have often tried to figure out why. Why were the Romans such geniuses at military and civic organization, and the Greeks not? Why were the Greeks so successful economically for some hundreds of years before Christ only to disappear for a time as a nation of importance in world history? Why did the Roman Empire rise and fall? When a second flowering of civilization occurred on the Italian peninsula during the Renaissance, why was it in the arts rather than in military science, as at a much earlier period? What caused the British Empire to expand over the entire face of the globe in the nineteenth Century and to decline almost equally rapidly in the twentieth? Why were the British more successful than any other European nation?

Answers by historians to such questions tend to be given in terms of particular events in history, such as a battle that was won or lost, suddenly favorable terms of trade, or the discovery of a new economic resource to exploit.

Ever since psychologists observed that motivated people or animals learn faster, they have been interested in how motives combine with other variables to increase the probability that a response will occur. In more general terms the question is, What factors in what combinations will best predict what response will be made, or if made, how often and how strongly it will be made?

All psychologists except a few association theorists like Guthrie (1935) assume that motives, rewards, or reinforcers are one of the determinants of response strength, and that there are also several other determinants that need to be taken into account. To begin with, the environmental Situation is obviously important. A hungry rat will run faster through a maze or learn the correct turns more quickly than a satiated rat, but only if there is food in the goal box, and only if the rat can get into the maze. In other words, if one is interested in predicting the strength of the maze-running response, it is helpful not only to know how hungry the rat is, but also that the rat has access to the maze and that there is food available at the end of it. Response strength is jointly determined by a motivational variable in the organism and certain environmental variables.

More than most textbooks in psychology, this book reflects the work, the life, and the personality of its author. After forty prolific years of boldly original research and theorizing on the topic of human motivation, David McClelland has not produced a conservative, homogenized, and middle-of-the-road review of the literature. Like Personality, McClelland's classic textbook on personality psychology written over thirty years ago, this text takes some risks. First, the book does not aim to review all of the important literature on human motivation; rather, it seeks to explore in some detail a selected set of critical and intriguing motivational issues. Second, the book does not merely summarize theories, methods, and research findings pertaining to the scientific study of human motivation; rather, it attempts a theoretical synthesis of its own based on the author's particular perspective on human motivation—a perspective that has developed through a number of stages during the last forty years.

David Winter (1982)—a Student and colleague of McClelland—has recently traced McClelland's intellectual biography as a psychologist through six stages. From his rigorous training within the behaviorist tradition of Clark Hull at Yale and his early research on verbal discrimination learning, McClelland moved to the study of thematic measurement of psychological motives (such as the achievement motive) in the late 1940s.

• MOTIVES AS ONE OF THREE MAJOR DETERMINANTS OF BEHAVIOR

What is the subject matter of motivation? From the commonsense point of view, motivation refers on one hand to conscious intents, to such inner thoughts as, I wish I could play the piano, I want to be a doctor, and I am trying hard to solve this problem. On the other hand, looking at behaviors from the outside, motivation refers to inferences about conscious intents that we make from observing behaviors. Thus, if we see a young girl perform a connected series of acts such as walking into a room, drawing up the piano stool, getting out some music, opening the piano, and starting to play, we infer that she wants to play the piano. If she stops playing after a while, we infer that she no longer wants to play the piano. As Marshall Jones (1955) put it in introducing the annual volumes of the Nebraska Symposium on Motivation, the subject matter of motivation has to do with “how behavior gets started, is energized, is sustained, is directed, is stopped.” Put another way, motivation has to do with the why of behavior, as contrasted with the how or the what of behavior. We can observe what the girl is doing, that is, playing the piano. Or we can observe how she is doing it, that is, what motor skills she is using to play the piano. Or we can try to determine why she is doing what she is doing.

The psychology of motivation is a broad and loosely defined field. It covers everything from detailed investigations of the physiological mechanisms involved in animal drives to elaborate analyses of the unconscious motives behind abnormal or symptomatic acts in a person to factor analyses of the motives people assign to themselves to explain their behavior. Different textbooks and different courses have been organized around these different areas of investigation. In this book we will draw on all these sources of information and attempt to provide an integrated view of the field by narrowing somewhat the focus of attention.

The book emphasizes how motives differ from other determinants of action and how they relate to other motivation-type variables such as emotions, incentives, values, causal explanations, and conscious and unconscious intents. It examines how motives are acquired, where they come from, and on what they are based. Biological sources of human motives are reviewed, and this review introduces the topic of natural incentives, or what is sometimes called intrinsic motivation. Some selectivity is necessary in reviewing the large field of animal research on motivation in order to focus on biological sources of individual differences in human motive strength. Social sources of differences in motive strength are also considered, including everything from the way parents rear their children to educational interventions designed to change peoples' motives. Such studies contribute not only practical information on how to develop motives, but also theoretical information on the nature of motives and how they differ from other characteristics.

• THORNDIKE'S STUDIES OF ANIMAL MOTIVATION

At the very moment Freud was discovering the motives behind the dreams of his patients in Vienna, psychologists in the United States were pursuing a radically different approach to understanding motivation. They felt that reports of inner states of mind were unreliable and therefore could never form the basis of an objective science of psychology patterned after the natural sciences. The idea is nicely expressed in a recent physiology textbook (Vander, Sherman, & Luciano, 1975): “Conscious experiences are difficult to investigate because they can be known only by verbal report. Such studies lack objectivity … in an attempt to bypass these difficulties scientists have studied the behavioral correlates of mental phenomena in other animals.”

It was this line of reasoning that led the U.S. psychologist Edward L. Thorndike to begin studies of motivation and learning in kittens, dogs, and chickens in the 1890s. He placed animals in boxes made out of orange crate slats with a door that opened when a string was pulled or a button inside was turned from the vertical to the horizontal position.

Students of personality have been primarily interested in motivational dispositions in the individual. They have asked, What motives are there? How many are there? What are the most important motives? How do we know what motives a person has? This chapter's goal is to provide an overview of the answers to such questions that motivational theorists have given and, in particular, to consider how motives might be measured in people. Let us begin with the phenomena that have led theorists to assign motive dispositions to people.

• MOTIVES AS REASONS FOR WHAT PEOPLE SPEND THEIR TIME DOING

To a considerable extent there is a theory of motivation to go with every field of human endeavor. We observe that people do various things frequently and infer that therefore they must want to do them. People eat; therefore, they must want to eat. Some people do well in school, so we infer they have a need for academic success. Children play; therefore, they must have a need to play. Some people save; therefore, there must be a saving drive. People in business often work hard, and since business is organized around making a profit, economic theorists from the time of Karl Marx to the present have assumed they work because of the profit motive. In fact, a modern theorist like John Kenneth Galbraith (1967) has not hesitated to write a chapter in a book on economics entitled “The General Theory of Motivation” based on his observations of the various goals of economic enterprise.

• EARLY ATTEMPTS TO FIND A BIOLOGICAL BASIS FOR MOTIVES

Motives as we experience them are bewilderingly complex. We want to graduate from College. We would like to be respected by others. We want to be loved. We would like to get married. We would like some excitement in our lives. Or perhaps we would just like to be able to study harder. Where do these motives come from? Are they instinctive, as McDougall, Freud, and Maslow argued (see Chapter 2)? Are they simply the product of our learning to satisfy certain biological needs like hunger, as the behaviorist model argued (see Chapter 3)? Do we learn to want these things because our society teaches us that we should want them? Or are there some deeper drives guiding human action that shape society?

Initially many theorists like McDougall had found it easy simply to reason that certain fundamental urges were biologically built in, or instinctive. The behaviorists, however, were skeptical. They felt such a hypothesis was vague and impossible to test empirically. How could one prove that a drive for power, for example, was instinctive rather than built on social learning? Since the behaviorists were oriented entirely toward overt behavior (rather than inner “urges”), they not unreasonably asked what were the fixed action patterns, shown by all human infants (prior to learning), that would signal the presence of an innate power need.

• APPLYING EXPECTANCY-VALUE THEORY TO IMPROVING ACADEMIC PERFORMANCE

As it became evident in the 1960s that human motives were related to important human endeavors like entrepreneurship and management, investigators turned their attention to methods of changing motives to improve Performance. Since the emphasis was on Performance Output rather than on motive change in itself, these efforts to produce change can best be understood in terms of the formula for predicting response Output presented in previous chapters. According to that formula, response Output, given environmental opportunity, is a function of motive strength (M) times probability of success (Ps) times incentive value (V). Technically, response probability can be increased by changing environmental opportunity or any one of the three person variables in the equation. Early efforts to introduce change focused on affecting the probability of success variable. School learning or skill acquisition affects this variable. If people learn how to do something better, it by definition increases the probability of their succeeding at that activity and makes it more likely that they will carry out the activity if they are also motivated to do it and they value it. But motive development courses approached probability of success in a different way. They manipulated the perceived probability of success without teaching skills directly.

In Chapter 6 we examined in detail how individual differences in motive strength can best be measured, because in science, measurement is of central importance. Without it we would still be in the position of McDougall, speculating about what motives there are and how they affect behavior. This chapter and the next chapters in Part 3 attempt to summarize what has been found out about several social motives that have been measured by the method recommended in Chapter 6—by coding fantasy or spontaneous thought patterns. For each motive we will Start by explaining how the method of measuring it in fantasy was developed, then turn to the evidence indicating it really is a measure of a motive using the validity criteria established in Chapter 6, and finally summarize what is known about how people behave who score high in the motive measured in this way. Naturally, there has been curiosity about how people develop a strong motive of one type or another, so at the end of each chapter is a section summarizing what is known about how people acquire such a motive.

The emphasis on measurement may seem boring or unnecessary, but the fact is that progress has been made in the field of motivation only as some standardization in measurement occurred.

• THE MOTIVATIONAL SEQUENCE

What is needed now is a general model of motivated behavior. Experimentalists deal with motivation—with short-term situational influences like food, variety, requests for obedience, or electric shock that arouse approach or avoidance behavior immediately. Personality theorists or clinicians typically think in terms of motives, that is, stable dispositions that organize or explain much of what a person says and does. How do these two approaches fit together? What exactly is a motive disposition, and how should individual differences in its strength be measured? According to clinicians, some people, like Freud, have a strong need for fame, recognition, or power. How do we determine how weak or how strong the power motive is in different individuals? How is a disposition like the power motive aroused by a Situation, and when aroused, how does it influence what the person does? These are the questions to which this chapter is addressed.

Motives are based on emotionally arousing incentives, which were discussed in the previous chapters. The incentives Start out by being natural in the sense that they innately give rise to different types of positive or negative emotions. As we have seen, however, their nature changes rapidly with learning.