Motivation pt. I: Haphazard Dichotomies

I needed to do a little refresher on motivation for another audience, so I’m going to subject you all to it as well. This will, I expect, be fairly superficial because the 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 messy. But even at a high level, there are some interesting frameworks for understanding what makes people do things. And then, as I am wont to do, we’ll shoehorn some neuroscience in there too—thinking about how the brain and the nervous system might contribute to the whole thing.

This is the first part of a two part series. We’ll call this one “A collection of haphazard dichotomies” because mainly, motivation theorists seem particularly fond of setting up two categories of motivations that stand in opposition to each other. This is partly because of how messy motivation is to think about. But also because, as part two explores, trying to sticky-tape it all together also has fairly mixed results.

And, honestly, in isolation, these binary theories aren’t really that useful, but if you use them sort-of like a checklist, you could probably do a pretty good armchair analysis of what made someone do something. I’ll run you through them, then show you what I mean.

¶Intrinsic vs Extrinsic

So we, like every first year psych class, will start with 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 else is compelling 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 out of 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.

¶Normative vs Motivating reasons

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.

¶Thinky vs Non-thinky

You’ll find that people often want to separate the motivations we think about and the motivations that come more automatically. 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).

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,⁴ 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.⁵

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.

¶Stability vs Change (a.k.a. homeostasis)

This one isn’t really posed as a dichotomy, but in an important way, it is. 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.’

¶Putting them together

Alright. So we have our ‘checklist’. Individually, they’re kind of interesting, but it’s when you put them together you get the really juicy fidelity on why people do what they do.

Let’s take Joan. I actually know Joan (not her real name), and I was stuck in a situation where my parents, her friends, fucked off for a while, leaving me the uneasy task of politely entertaining her for a while. All I knew about Joan was that she was not very chatty, and that she’d recently quit her job to move up the coast and start a small organic farm (zucchini or something random like that). With our little checklist, we actually have the tools to have a pretty interesting conversation with Joan.

We can talk about her intrinsic and extrinsic motivations to start. Why’d she move? To escape the corporate grind. That’s extrinsic. But maybe there’s something deeper too—something intrinsic. So we can go after that, and if we did, we’d find that she’s actually pretty passionate about the outdoors and sustainable farming practices. In the course of things, we might also find out, as I did, that she’s secretly pleased by how people see her as a sort-of champion for the environment. A little extrinsic bonus.

We could also chat to her about the difference between the normative and the motivating reasons. Normatively, life on a farm (assuming you have the cash and you’re not isolated) is going to be much better for your health and wellbeing than life in the city. That was a nice 15 minute tangent. But it turns out that Joan didn’t really care about this at all. Joan decided to move largely because her new boss was a bit of a dickhead. That was a shorter chat, but more amusing.

Joan was an analyst of some kind, the exact nature of which I never quite understood. But suffice to say, she was a thinky person. We spent a bit of time talking about her rationalisations for the project—projected earnings, the impact on the local community, some fairly calculated ideas about her mental health. But frankly, it was obvious that Joan moved because of some more visceral reaction against the oppressive monotony of her workplace, a romantic impulse to return to nature, and a knee-jerk reaction to her dickhead boss.

And lastly, Joan, who had only just begun her new life on the farm, was experiencing a wholly new and profound set of challenges. A complete destabilisation. Very little was in balance. But already, she’d found a deep sense of satisfaction in pursuing a new equilibrium, more aligned with her values and her sense of how life should be. A motivation for change and a different sense of stability.

Our little checklist has made you quite the conversationalist. Or, if you’re of a more Machiavellian persuasion, it’s easy enough to see how you could’ve persuaded Joan to buy your little farm in the middle of nowhere so you could return to the city she just left.

¶Outro

As I said up top, motivation theory is a bit all over the place. But when you collect it all together it gets a bit more insightful. Part two of this series goes over some theories of motivation that do try to put it all together. But even without these more complicated theories, you can get quite a lot of utility just rolling through these haphazard dichotomies. It’s just a matter of digging a little.