The Psychobiology of Human Motivation

Hugh Wagner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317798194
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Why is one person motivated to create a business empire whilst another is inspired to produce a beautiful work of art? Why do some people prefer a quiet life?
The Psychobiology of Human Motivation explores what directs our behaviour, from basic physiological needs like hunger and thirst to more complex aspects of social behaviour like altruism. Hugh Wagner explores the limits of biological explanations and shows how humans can influence `basic' physiological drives in order to adapt to a complex social environment.

Chapter 1

Introduction and Overview

■ Motivation

Types of motivation

Approaches to motivation

■ The biological bases of behaviour

Evolution and genetics

Biological psychology

■ Summary

■ Further reading

Motivation

Psychologists and non-psychologists alike have always wanted to explain why people do the things that they do. Different people seem to be driven by different motives: while one devotes the majority of his or her time to achieving the largest possible business empire, another chooses to focus on creating beautiful works of art. While one strives to achieve the greatest possible success in a chosen field, another just wants a quiet and relatively anonymous life. Such considerations give rise to many questions about the nature of motivation. Are we all driven by the same basic motives so that business success and artistic creativity equally satisfy the same underlying need? Or are they qualitatively different types of motivation? How are different motives related to one another? Are some motives basic and others in some way secondary to, or derived from them? How does the satisfaction of one motive affect other motivation? Are there specifically human types of motivation, or are human motives elaborations of motives that we share with other species? To what extent are we aware of the motives that govern our own behaviour?

All behaviour except the simplest reflexes is considered to be motivated. Motivation controls behaviour and is usually regarded as having two aspects: it energises behaviour and directs it towards some goal. Motives can be classified in numerous ways as can attempts to explain them. Bearing in mind that it is impossible to separate completely classifications and explanations, in this section we will look briefly at general issues concerning types of motivation and theories of motivation.

Types of Motivation

Maslow (1954) proposed that human motivation has a hierarchical structure which he called a hierarchy of needs (see Table 1.1). This hierarchy provides a useful starting point for our overview of motivation, and although I will not pursue Maslow's theory beyond this, I will take issue with some details. At the lowest level in Maslow's hierarchy are physiological needs. These are needs which appear to have a basis in physiological changes. We have to make a further distinction amongst physiological needs which derive from imbalances in the body, like hunger and thirst, which we will call homeostatic needs, and those which do not have the function of maintaining bodily equilibrium, which we will call non-homeostatic needs. The homeostatic needs that I focus on in this book are the needs for sleep (‘fatigue’), thirst and hunger. In Chapters 3, 4 and 5 I examine the physiological mechanisms of each of these and also consider their biological importance and psychological influences on them.

TABLE 1.1 Maslow's hierarchy of needs and an alternative classification

Maslow's hierarchy			Alternative view
Level of need	Motivation		Motivation	Type of motive
Self- actualisation	curiosity peak experiences creative living fulfilling work		cognitive consistency	Cognitive motives
Esteem	confidence mastery self-respect		achievement self-esteem	Self-integrative motives
Love	free expression sense of warmth sense of growing together		self- presentation cooperation altruism	Social motives
Safety	security comfort calm		aggression sex ?curiosity	Non- homeostatic
Physiological	fatigue sex hunger thirst		?sleep hunger thirst	Homeostatic

In Maslow's hierarchy, non-homeostatic needs are represented by sex, and we will look at the origins of sexual behaviour, and some of its variations, in Chapter 6. Another non-homeostatic need that we will look at is aggression. Although this is absent from Maslow's hierarchy it could perhaps belong with the next level of needs, needs for safety, since it is partly concerned with defence of the animal. However, it also serves reproductive functions and so might be considered with the physiological needs. We look at these functions of aggression, their origins and control in Chapter 7.

The first two levels in the hierarchy are together described as basic needs. This term is something of a problem as its use is not consistent from writer to writer. These needs are basic in Maslow's hierarchy because they are at the bottom of the pile and must be satisfied before other needs can be attended to. (This, by the way, is one problem with Maslow's approach, since it does not allow, for example, for the phenomenon of the artist starving in a garret: out of adversity comes creativity.) But ‘basic’ can also mean fundamental, in the sense that other motives are derived from them.

The next two levels of need in the hierarchy are together described as psychological needs. The lower of these is called ‘love’ but is actually composed of a variety of social motives based on group membership. Next are needs that Maslow called ‘esteem’, which we shall include as self-integration motives. We will examine these cognitive and social motives briefly in Chapter 9. Finally come self-actualisation needs. While these include curiosity and the avoidance of boredom (which we will look at with cognitive motivation in Chapter 9), they are presented by Maslow as the summit of human motivation. People operating at this motivational level, ‘self-actualisers’, are considered to be on a higher personal level. The hierarchy can be viewed as representing the sequence in which needs arose during evolution and may relate to mechanisms in parts of the brain that evolved at different stages. This is another way in which those lower in the hierarchy might be called ‘basic’.

Approaches to motivation

My earlier general comments about motivation mixed terms suggesting a mechanistic approach (e.g. ‘driven’) with terms suggesting self-direction (e.g. ‘chooses’). Most approaches to motivation have tended towards the mechanistic. Quite early in the history of psychology the dominant view was that human and animal motivation was determined by a number of instincts. The dominant instinct theorist within mainstream psychology was McDougall (1908), who defined an instinct as ‘an inherited or innate psychological disposition to perceive, and pay attention to, objects of a certain class … and to act in regard to [them] in a particular manner, or, at least, to experience an impulse to such action’. The second part of this definition clearly describes motivation. McDougall recognised eighteen instincts, mostly corresponding to the three lowest levels of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Thus, motives are innately determined, although McDougall argued that they could be modified by experience, and that we can control whether or not we act on our impulses.

At about the same time the other major instinct theorist, Freud, was developing his view that all motivation was ultimately reducible to two basic and opposed sources of energy, the life instinct and the death instinct (see Freud, 1922). Freud insisted that we are not generally aware of the operation of these instincts, which are unconscious sources of motivation. Further, all acts, including apparently unmotivated acts like slips of the tongue, are in fact motivated, revealing to the initiated some aspect of our unconscious motivation. Our usual explanations for our behaviour do not relate to our true unconscious motives.

More recent approaches have continued the generally mechanistic approach of these early theorists. The homeostatic motives are commonly viewed from a physiological perspective. That is, they serve clearly defined bodily needs and the approach is to identify the physiological mechanisms through which the needs are assessed and their satisfaction achieved. We will look at the principles of this approach in Chapter 4. Generally the approach is to consider that a need arises from a specific tissue deficit. This leads to a drive that energises (and perhaps directs) the animal to consummatory behaviour that satisfies the need. There is little useful debate about the general nature of this motivational system, apart from difference of opinion about whether drive states are specific to particular needs or whether they operate as a general state. But this book is not a physiology text and we will want to go beyond the description of physiological mechanisms. The aim of the approach taken by this book is to explore the limits of physiological explanation of human motivation. In each chapter we will look at the ways in which humans can control or otherwise influence the ‘basic’ physiological drives.

Drive-reduction theories attempt to explain non-physiological motivation in a way that is parallel to physiological motivation. That is, people are assumed to pass into a state of deprivation akin to the tissue deficit of a homeostatic need. This leads to a drive state that is either general, or specific to the particular state of deprivation. This drive leads the person into ‘consummatory’ behaviour that relieves the state of deprivation. As a simple example, which we will look at more closely in Chapter 9, deprivation of novel stimulation leads to a state which we experience as boredom and which reflects a drive to seek out stimulation. When novel stimulation is found the deprivation is reduced and boredom disappears.

Drive-reduction theories date mostly from the behaviourist period in psychology, and were actually applied not to psychological needs but to physiological needs as the basis of theories of learning. Because the reduction of a drive is pleasant it rewards behaviour that immediately precedes it, that is it makes that behaviour more likely to occur. Learning theorists such as Hull (1943) described drive as non-specific, that is capable of energising any behaviour and supporting any kind of learning. Further consideration of learning theory is beyond the scope of this book. We will return to the issue of specificity or generality of drive in Chapter 9.

Learning theorists described the physiological drives as primary drives in the sense that the drives arise internally but are directed by external stimuli. Learning can modify the external stimuli with which the drive is associated. The theorists attempted to apply these principles to other types of motivation which they described as secondary drives. These were learned in the sense that the source of the motivation is learned but the drive state itself is the same as for a primary drive. When an initially neutral stimulus is paired with the satisfaction of a primary drive, that stimulus itself comes to evoke a similar drive state. This was said to be demonstrated by conditioned emotional responses. Pairing of a frightening stimulus (an electric shock or a loud noise) with a previously neutral stimulus led to the neutral stimulus itself becoming frightening. However, it was impossible to demonstrate empirically this sort of process taking place for the ‘higher’ motives of human beings, and it seems intrinsically far-fetched to explain a thirst for knowledge, glory, pride, creativity and so on as conditioned responses.

Modern approaches to motivation borrow the language of drive-reduction theory, but apply it in a more general way. Thus, the term ‘d...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Psychology Focus
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Series preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction and Overview
• 2 Essentials of human physiology
• 3 Biological rhythms and sleep
• 4 Homeostasis and drinking
• 5 Hunger and eating
• 6 Sex
• 7 Aggression
• 8 Reward and addiction
• 9 Cognitive and social motives
• Glossary
• References
• Index