On Motivation

Last year, I did a little motivation refresher for another audience, and decided to write it up here and here. Since then, I’ve been asked to speak about motivation theories a bunch of times, and my thinking has evolved a little bit. So I thought I would consolidate those refreshers and my new thinking here.

¶Motivation “theory” isn’t really a thing

Before we get into it though, we probably want to start by pointing out two of the more irksome aspects of talking about motivation. The first is that, although there is a sub-discipline of psychology called “the psychology of motivation”, really all psychology is at least trivially about motivation. As I say elsewhere:

You can make some rough distinctions in the sciences of mind. People who say they study psychology are usually interested in how and why people behave in certain ways. People who say they study cognitive science are usually interested in how people think about stuff. And people who say they study neuroscience are usually interested in how the actual architecture works—the brain and the nervous system more broadly.

In short, psychology and cognitive science are all about exploring what makes people think and act.

As such, it’s not really straightforward to tease out the “motivational” aspects of psychology from all of the aspects of psychology, because what is motivation if not “what makes people think and act”?

The second problem, related to the first, is that:

psychology of motivation is one of those sub-disciplines that’s a bit vague and all over the place. Probably this is because ‘motivation’ is a word that could be used to describe a lot of very different things.¹

Like, it’s not clear to me that the motivation to drink (thirst), prompted by a mechanism that monitors the amount of water in your cells, meaningfully sits in the same category as the motivation to listen to your Spotify daily mix in search of new songs you might like. It’s not even clear to me that the motivation to drink because your cells are too dry is in the same category as the motivation to drink because you’re anticipating there being less water in the future.

It’s a messy concept, because as I said before, all of psychology is trivially about the things that motivate us.

But, there are some interesting frameworks that help us think about what makes people do things, and if we think about these frameworks, rather than specific theories, then things look a little less messy. Indeed, if we think about the frameworks rather than the theories, then you can use whatever psychology theory you prefer.

So let’s look at the frameworks.

¶Content theories (what motivates us)

The theories that seem to be most attractive to people we can call content theories. These are theories that try to describe what kinds of thing motivate us—the content of our motivations. You might also hear them called needs-based theories, because another way of talking about what kind of things motivate us is talking about what kind of things we need. It’s the same kind of theory, just focusing on the thing (content) or the person (need).

¶Intrinsic vs Extrinsic

I’ll give you the quintessential motivation theory to illustrate: intrinsic and extrinsic motivations. Does the motivation to do something come from the activity itself (intrinsic)? Or from something external to the activity (extrinsic)? Intrinsic motivators are things you pursue for their own sake—maybe you enjoy it, or it’s intellectually stimulating, or it fills you with purpose. Extrinsic motivators are things you do because something other than the activity itself is encouraging you to. Maybe you’ll be paid for it, or punished for not doing it. Or maybe you value the outcome more than the activity—cleaning your room isn’t fun, but your housemates will be pleased.

You don’t want to think too hard about the distinction, or you’ll lose track of it. So, you might be a vegetarian for climate reasons, but it’s not entirely clear what’s intrinsic and extrinsic there. I’ve written about this before, but a lot of climate reasoning is weirdly circular. If you’ll allow me to be a bit glib, you’re probably doing this ‘for the planet’—that seems extrinsic. But you’re doing it for the planet because you like the planet how it is—the planet doesn’t particularly care—so that seems intrinsic. Probably you don’t want the climate to become unlivable—that seems extrinsic. But similarly, you probably feel good about yourself for taking action on the climate—that seems intrinsic.

Or, you might do something at work that isn’t that pleasant. Maybe it makes you look good, or sets you on track for promotion (extrinsic). But maybe you take pleasure in being good at your job too (intrinsic). To make things more complicated, these are both egoistic motivations (they benefit you), which you can compare to altruistic motivations (they benefit others). Altruism seems, superficially automatically intrinsically motivating—the thing you did at work helped your colleague, for example; a selfless act motivated by your concern for the wellbeing of others. But lots of people wonder if this kind of altruism really exists. Is your concern for the wellbeing of others really about them? Or about how good it makes you feel? And if you’re doing this for them because it suits you like this, is that intrinsic or extrinsic? Let me know when you figure it out.

And you’ll find that most things we do come, like this, with a complicated set of intrinsic and extrinsic reasons that are difficult to disentangle.

What’s useful about it though, is knowing that intrinsic motivations are usually more powerful and sustainable than extrinsic motivations, and extrinsic motivations are usually more easy to leverage. If you can’t get yourself, or others, to act because they intrinsically give a shit, you can probably work out some extrinsic reason worth doing it for (a reward or a punishment). And if you can work out where the intrinsic motivation lies, then trying to optimise for that will make it more motivating.

¶Maslow et al.

Intrinsic and extrinsic, as we’ve seen, can only get you so far. Other people like to break down what motivates us with a bit more granularity. Probably the most famous example of this is Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.

A stylisation of Maslow's hierarchy. The pyramid is an invention of business consultants, but roughly Maslow's idea was that we're motivated to satisfy the deficiency needs to a certain extent before we start to be motivated by our growth needs.

The pyramid is an invention of management consultants but, roughly, Maslow reckoned we can think of ‘tiers’ of needs, with different levels of priority. Some needs could be called ‘deficiency needs’: ones we are motivated to maintain at a certain level. Others could be called ‘growth needs’: needs we can invest in once our deficiency needs are met to a certain level of satisfaction. It’s really not that complicated, but you can read more here about how people misunderstand it.

Maslow’s hierarchy isn’t just well-loved by management consultants, but also sociologists, ed-dev specialists, and Instagram influencers because it does a pretty good job of illustrating at a high level what kinds of things drive people, and under what circumstances. But because Maslow was philosophising, not measuring, it’s received plenty of criticism for failing to represent various groups under various circumstances.

One of the main things people like to concentrate on is the lack of emphasis Maslow placed on interpersonal needs. So, while many of the alternative content theories really just riff on the core ideas Maslow spent his life thinking about, some of their reshuffling brings out more our relational and cultural needs. For example, you have Alderfer’s ERG theory which condenses Maslow’s tiers to three: [E]xistence needs, [R]elatedness needs, and [G]rowth needs. Or you have McClellend’s ‘Three needs’, which speaks of people’s needs for achievement in their lives, affiliation with others, and power or influence over others. Or you have Schutz, who was only concerned with relationships, considering our need for belonging, affection, and control within them.

A stylisation of McLelland's three needs. None take precedence over the others, but McLelland obviously left much out. In fact, he considered these a summary of another theorist by the name of Murray, who listed 20 needs.

A related interest, and an overlapping critique of Maslow, has been the tension between our need to be distinct from others, and our need to be intertwined with them. So, McClellend’s model considered this—the need for affiliation with others being distinct from the our need for control over them. Self-determination theory is a bit too high-speed for me, attempting to sticky-tape six or so (it’s still growing!) mini-theories into one, but like McClelland, their ‘Basic needs’ mini-theory highlights autonomy, competence, and relatedness as our core psychological needs.

The Human givens model zooms back out again, ungrouping the needs as Maslow did, but with far more emphasis on needs for relatedness and autonomy. So they highlight security, autonomy and control, status, privacy, attention, community connection, intimacy, competence or achievement, and lastly a need for purpose.

¶Going too far with content

The only content theory that really seems to be doing something quite different is Max-Neef’s Needs Taxonomy, which considers motivations as multidimensional things. So, Max-Neef would consider any of the motivations we’ve covered so far as axiological: related to the things we value as humans. He thought we could consider these against another set of motivations—existential needs. He suggested that we have a need for being, having, doing, and interacting. He also reckoned you needed to consider each need in relation to ourselves, others, and the environment. So:

• Being needs describe anything you could describe as an attribute of individuals or collectives. So, an existential need for being, in the axiological space around ‘subsistence’, would be something like health. And this can be considered in terms of health for ourselves, for our loved ones, and for the environment we find ourselves in.
• Having needs are more about the resources we want to collect to support ourselves. So an existential need for having, in the axiological space around affection, would be our relationship with ourself, our friendships, and our relationship to nature.
• Doing needs are about the actions we take. So an existential motivation to do, in the axiological space around ‘creation’, would be to reflect on ourselves, to work for others, or to build the environment around us.
• and, lastly, Interacting needs are about our bonds. A motivation to interact in the axiological space around identity or autonomy would be like the establishment of personal rituals, contribution to social rhythms, and the maintenance of physical spaces we belong to.

And if you read through all of that, or especially if you didn’t, you’ve probably realised why no one ever talks about Max-Neef’s needs, and no one seems to care about all the critiques of Maslow’s model. You can zoom in or out as much as you like, or cluster things in whatever collections feel appropriate to the thing that you’re looking at. But the needs Maslow identified do a pretty good job at capturing the content of people’s motivations.

¶What we can take away

The only thing we should be cautious about, as the critics make clear, is that our interpersonal and, by extension, our autonomy needs take up much more space than we might care to admit, and Maslow’s more aspirational motivations typically take a backseat. Indeed, even Maslow’s later focus on transcendence or what the Human givens model called a motivation for ‘purpose’ can be found within our interpersonal relations. Giving yourself up to something bigger than yourself can be spiritual or environmental, but it can just as easily be about giving yourself to your community.

¶Process theories (how we’re motivated)

Process theories are another class of motivation theories. But these describe more how motivation occurs than what motivates us. Process theories are often quite neglected, because they’re rather boring. But without thinking about how we’re motivated, thinking about what motivates us is kind of useless. To explain why, we’ll take a slight tangent.

¶Motivations that actually motivate

In philosophy, we make a distinction between normative and motivating reasonsing. This is a more philosophical approach to motivations, and it’d be weird to come across this in a psych class, but useful nonetheless because it helps distinguish motivations that exist from motivations that actually motivate us.

It’s hard to pin this down exactly, and philosophers themselves are still hashing it out. But you could say that normative reasons are all the motivations that might exist—anything you could point to and say ‘that might be why they did what they did’.

Motivating reasons are simpler to define.² They’re the motivations that actually guided our behaviour.

The Stanford Encyclopaedia gives a good example of why this perspective is useful:

Consider the behaviour of Othello in Shakespeare’s play … Othello kills Desdemona guided by the belief, induced by jealous Iago, that she has been unfaithful to him … The tragedy of the play lies in the fact that Desdemona is innocent

Here, there is no normative reason: Desdemona wasn’t unfaithful.³ But because Othello believed Desdemona was unfaithful, he was motivated to kill her—a motivating reason.

¶Expectation drives desire

So we have to tie a motivation to a causal chain that lets us understand what, of all the motivations, are the motivations that actually motivated us. Expectancy Theory is an excellent example of how to do this:

A stylisation of Expectancy Theory. The idea is that we ask how individual effort will lead to individual performance, and how will performance lead to a desired outcome, and how will those outcomes satisfy our personal needs and goals.

So, the idea is that first, we assess the likelihood that our effort will result in performance. Then we’ll assess how likely the performance we think we can achieve will lead to some desired outcome—a reward or an absence of something bad.⁴ Then we’ll think about how likely those desired outcomes are to satisfy our personal goals or needs, and as such, how attractive those outcomes or rewards are.

You have a bunch of these. Management consultants love them. Equity Theory, Goal-Setting Theory, some of the aforementioned mess that is Self-Determination Theory.

It’s notable that all of these are half a century old, or more. It’s also notable that defending these theories to uppity undergraduate students is incredibly difficult, because none of them really add anything over and above the rest. Essentially, you need to link what people are doing to what they perceive they’re doing, and from there to some clear idea about what’s going do happen when the thing is done, and most importantly, what they’re going to get out of it as a consequence. The rest seems to be mostly a matter of the content that you populate those outcomes with.

¶Automatic motivations

Just to make the complaint I had at the start nice and sharp—that there’s little distinction between motivation theories and all psychology theories, the most quintessential psychology theories are also process theories.

Classical conditioning, and operant conditioning are two fundamental psychological theories that describe how we are “programmed” to behave in certain ways.

A stylisation of the theories of classical and operant conditioning. Pair a natural instinct (like the salivation response to food) with something nice and obvious (like a ringing bell), and soon the obvious thing (the bell) will produce the instinct (salivation) even in the absence of whatever the instinct is normally prompted by (food). That's classical condition. Operant condition is where you train behaviour by rewarding or punishing it, and there isn't a huge amount more to explain about it than that.

When we are classically conditioned, we have learned that something in the environment predicts something we want or don’t want. A hand being raised predicts you getting hit, so you flinch, or the ice cream van song predicts delicious ice cream so your mouth starts watering. It’s motivation at the most fundamental level.

Operant conditioning describes how we are trained to behaviour through reward and punishment. Eventually, even without those rewards and punishments we will continue to behave in those ways. Again, motivation in its most fundamental form.

Both of these are still forms of expectation, and you could bend Expectancy Theory to explain them if you wanted (or any of the others). But really, what we see is that psychology as a discipline has many ways of showing us how motivations come about.

¶Maintenance theories (how to keep motivation going)

So we know what motivates us (content, or needs) and we know how those things motivate us (process). But the same things don’t motivate us all the time. Motivation needs to be ongoing to be at all useful. And while ‘maintenance theories’ aren’t really considered a distinct class of models, this is my website and I’ll do what I want here.

¶Thinky versus Non-Thinky Motivations

We might first make a distinction that comes out of speaking to our more automatic motivations, since we were already talking about conditioning. You’ll find that people often want to separate these out from the motivations we “think” about. So, like:

• biological vs cognitive motivations;
• rational vs irrational motivations;
• conscious vs unconscious motivations;

and so on.

I don’t really think this is very helpful. Unless you’re a really strict non-materialist—you think that there’s some soul or psyche that’s distinct from the stuff sloshing around in your body—then it’s probably obvious to you that if you’ve had a thought (a ‘thinky’ motivation), something needed to precede the thought (a ‘non-thinky’ motivation).

"Thinky" motivations we call things like 'cognitive', or 'rational' or 'conscious'. Thinking with the head, not the heart. Really this is just a way of referring to motivations that are more future-oriented, cool, and long-term. This in comparison to 'biological', 'irrational', 'unconscious', "non-thinky" motivations, which are really just motivations that are more urgent, now-oriented, and passionate.

If you take the example of Othello before, his conscious or cognitive motivation might have been something like “I’ll kill Desdemona because she’s a whore” or whatever,⁵ but it’s never really clear to me why I’d be interested in that in a different way to his biological and unconscious jealous rage. They’re the same thing, motivationally speaking, aren’t they?

And I’ve made clear a couple times how silly I think the behavioural economists’ panic about rationality and irrationality is. Is it irrational to kill someone out of jealousy? Othello doesn’t think so. In Act 5 he’s all “Yet she must die, else she’ll betray more men.” and “If I quench thee, thou flaming minister, I can again thy former light restore”. It’s well known that the higher your IQ, the better you are at generating reasons to justify even the weirdest behaviour.⁶

A better distinction might be something like more urgent and passionate motivations and those that are more future-oriented and less pressing. This feels a bit more useful, and as I’ve written about before, is a bit more contiguous with what we know about emotion and the brain. There’s an important difference between the motivation that makes you hit someone for offending you, and the motivation that makes you let the moment slide. Both have thinky aspects, but one is a passionate satisfaction of your feelings now and the other is about how much more satisfying it would feel to not be bailed up for assault.

Maintaining motivation is a matter of recognising when the non-thinky is likely to interfere with the thinky and satisfying both. One way of doing that is considering our drives for stasis and change.

¶Stasis vs Change

Another example of a motivation theory that isn’t classically a motivation theoriy, homeostasis refers to the ways living systems keep themselves in balance. In us, it’s:

the idea that our body needs to remain in equilibrium in order to function. We need a certain amount water in our cells. When there is not enough water, we get thirsty and we drink. We need a certain amount of oxygen in our blood, so when the oxygen level is too low we get breathless and we breathe. We need certain nutrients, so when these get too low we get hungry and we eat. The body keeps itself in balance.

But, as I wrote about in that article, this isn’t purely physiological. It’s also in the mind. We regulate our emotions, to better or worse effect, just as we regulate our core temperature.

Many motivations come from this drive to keep our body in balance. But homeostasis implies that we live in a constantly changing world. There’d be no need for all this physical and mental machinery to keep things in balance if we weren’t always getting out of balance.

And getting out of balance is important too. Adapting to new situations, learning new things, or even—zooming out—the process of evolution. We often have to deviate from homeostatic states to develop, grow, or respond to what’s going on in the world.

So, there are a set of motivations that come from the drive to seek out change too. For anyone who was inspired by the movie Dune to read the books, the entire final book of the core saga, God Emperor, is about this. The book is half-a-century old, so I don’t feel bad spoiling the fact that Leto’s entire thing was to hold things so stable that the pent up desire for change would explode, into some golden era of irreversible flourishing:

I know a profound pattern which humans deny with their words even while their actions affirm it. They say they seek security and quiet, the condition they call peace. Even as they speak they create the seeds of turmoil and violence. If they find their quiet security they squirm in it. How boring they find it… [after Leto’s peace] They will seek their quiet security thereafter only with extreme caution and steadfast preparation.

Or, for those of you who never made it past the first book, you might remember Irulan’s musing:

And always, he fought the temptation to choose a clear, safe course, warning ‘That path leads ever down into stagnation.’

¶Motivational “hygiene”

For a more typical example, Hertzberg’s two-factor theory is also a nice, and easy, example of a theory that we can use to think about how motivation changes over time. Most people will class this as a content theory. But considering it as a maintenance theory makes more sense to me. Hertzberg reckoned that there was an important difference between motivators and what he called ‘hygiene factors’. To use this model, we have to think very carefully about what it is we want to be maintaining motivation on. In this context, motivators are things that bring satisfaction in the doing of the thing we want people to be motivated to do. Hygiene factors are the things that prevent dissatisfaction. They are hygienic in the sense that they maintain motivation to do the thing, like hygiene maintains health:

My stylisation of Hertzberg's two-factor theory. Hygiene factors could be considered motivators, but only in the sense that people will be dissatisfied if they don't have them---they won't necessarily want to do the thing. If you have enough hygiene factors, people might do the thing, but they aren't yet satisfied. Motivating factors are the factors that make people satisfied---they'll actually like that they're doing the thing.

So, we want someone to do something for us. We want them to be motivated to do that thing for us. A motivator might be that the thing we want them to do is satisfying in and of itself. A hygiene factor would be that we’re paying them to do it for us. Pay could be considered a motivator here if you were looking at the content theories—a subsistence motivation or something like this. But Hertzberg wants us to remember what we’re trying to do here. We want them to be doing the thing for us. If we don’t pay them enough, they might try to go do the thing for someone else. Or, if the pay is good, but the thing is not motivating, then they might go do something else even if the pay is less good, because it’s satisfying, and that makes their dissatisfaction with the pay less important. Pay is a hygiene factor here—it reduces dissatisfaction in doing the thing you want them to be doing, but it’s not the motivator—it’s not doing the job of satisfying them.

Another model that concentrates on maintenance, taking into account all the focus the content theories placed on our interpersonal needs, is the Job Characteristics Model. To quote myself, it:

describes three things we need to make us happy in the workplace:

1. Meaning – a job needs to provide us with a sense of purpose and movement towards a goal; be they personal or otherwise.
2. Responsibility – a job should provide us with scope to be responsible for and take ownership of the work we produce.
3. Knowledge of impact – we need to be able to see that impact of our work. If what we do makes no difference, we have no reason to do it.

Here, we see some of the same elements of the process theories we talked about earlier, but places the emphasis on how well the person can see their own role in making their desired outcomes come into being. Without that perception, motivation can’t be maintained, because it’s out of the person’s control. Equity theory, which is usually considered a process theory, makes a related point, in that people won’t continue to feel motivated if they think what’s going on isn’t fair.

¶McKinsey’s “influence” model is just a maintenance model

The last model is a model that wouldn’t fit anywhere if I hadn’t had the very clever idea of coming up with ‘maintenance theories’ is the McKinsey Influence Model:

A stylisation of the McKinsey Influence Model. We're more likely to keep doing the thing if we know why we're doing it, see others doing it as well as how they're doing it, have the skills to do the thing ourselves, and have formal mechanisms in place to support us in doing the thing.

McKinsey noticed (I am assuming; I still haven’t read their book) that if the ‘why’ of the thing we’re doing is clear, we’re more likely to believe in it, encouraging us to align our behaviours with our beliefs. Developing our skills and abilities means we’re going to be more confident we can participate in the thing we’re doing. Having role models both helps us orient to whatever target behaviours will help us do the thing quickly, while also making us feel the social pressure to conform. And formal structural mechanisms lend confidence that support is available while we’re at it.

Unlike the other two classes, content and process theories, I think each model in our ‘maintenance theories’ brings out a unique point, probably because I’m not trying to summarise the better part of a century of overlapping theory, but telling you exactly what I think. Hertzberg tells us that some content is going to be motivating, while other content is merely going to stop us from being de-motivated while we’re pursuing the motivations. The Job Characteristics Model tells us that a personal perception of control and impact is a critical factor in keeping us interested. And the McKinsey model describes the structure that should surround the content and processes that motivate us.

¶Outro

As I said upfront, motivation is a sprawling literature. This is the third time I’ve had a go at collecting it together. In the first I spoke about some of the dichotomies I’ve spoken about here—intrinsic vs extrinsic, thinky vs non-thinky, etc. In the second I spoke about these three ‘classes’—content theories, process theories, and maintenance theories.

In this article I pulled both together. Mostly because when I use this article to teach, I don’t want to send people to two different articles, but also because it demonstrates just how arbitrary theories of motivation are.

All psychology is motivational psychology. Anything that informs how we think and behave speaks to our motivations. The way you group them is entirely up to what you’re grouping them for. For me, that’s for teaching you. And if all I’ve taught you is to ignore people who speak about “motivational psychology” like it’s something useful and distinct, then I’ve done what I came here to do.