Basic categories of psychology: category “motive”.
The category of motive is no less important in psychology. Already in the first psychological theories, scientists considered the source of activity and sought to find the reason that prompts a person to move, i.e. sought to understand the motives that underlie our behavior. There were attempts to find a material explanation for these motives, while the motives were associated with moving atoms and “animal spirits”; there were also theories that spoke of their immateriality. Thus, Plato spoke about passionate or lustful souls, which are the bearers of motives, and Leibniz believed that activity, the urge to action, is a property of the monad soul. However, regardless of the interpretation of the nature of the motive, it, as a rule, was associated with emotions and was one of the main problems for all psychologists. Therefore, it is natural that in modern psychology the concept of motive (need, drive, desire) has become the leading category for almost all psychological schools.
Closely related to the category of motive is another category - experiences, a person’s emotional response to the phenomena of the external world and his actions and thoughts. Epicurus also argued that it is experiences that direct and regulate behavior, and modern psychologists also consider them as such. Despite the fact that the problem of the nature and dynamics of emotional processes has not yet received an unambiguous solution in psychology, the very fact of the importance of emotions and experiences not only in the regulation of activity, but also in the appropriation of knowledge, identification with the outside world, including with significant people, does not raises doubts.
Before entering the category of psychological categories and gaining a foothold in the language of science, the idea of motive invariably and everywhere appeared (under various names) in all cases when the question of the causes of human behavior arose. Motive (from Latin moveo - I move) is what moves a living being, for which it spends its vital energy. The motive cannot be adequately explained on its own, without the inseparable connections and initial inclusion in the system of those determinants - images, relationships, actions that constitute the general structure of mental life. His “service” in this life is represented by giving impetus and direction to behavior towards a goal, maintaining energetic reinforcement of behavior along the entire path of striving towards it. Being an indispensable “fuse” of any actions and their “combustible material”, the motive has long acted at the level of worldly wisdom in various ideas about feelings (for example, pleasure or displeasure), motivations, drives, aspirations, desires, passions, willpower, etc. Moving from worldly wisdom to scientific explanations, we should begin with views on motive in eras when the study of psychological issues was considered an activity for philosophers. Presupposed by the concept of attitude, the idea of organizing action in time combined two aspects as inseparable in the characterization of behavior: dependence on the previous state of the subject and prognostic orientation. During the period of antiquity, a distinguishing line was drawn not only between sensory knowledge and thinking, but also between these categories of phenomena and human motivations. Pythagoras, Democritus, Plato placed reason in the head, courage in the chest, sensual lust in the liver. For Plato, this distinction acquired an ethical character. He considered the rational soul (it settled in the head, as the closest to heaven, to the imperishable kingdom of ideas) as the highest asset of man. The low - “hungry” - part of the soul leads to base goals and interferes with noble motives. The mind was entrusted with the task of “curbing” these impulses tearing a person in different directions. Historian R. Watson sees the irony of history in the fact that the main contribution to psychology of Plato the philosopher, who placed reason above all else, came down to emphasizing the irrational in man. Among the functions of the soul, Aristotle identified the desire “for something” or “for something.” Behind this lay the idea, lost in subsequent psychology and revived in modern times, that a motive always has an objective orientation, since the object toward which the organism strives can become a goal only when presented in the form of an image. Aspiration is inseparable from sensation. It signals whether a goal has been achieved by causing feelings of pleasure or displeasure in the subject. Thus, the objectively inherent desire of the organism (which has the meaning of a motive that prompts the organism to act) was correlated with subjectively experienced feelings. Subsequently, the question of the connection between motivational factors and emotional ones will become the most important for many theories. For Aristotle, emotion itself (pleasure or displeasure) is not a motive for behavior, but a signal of achieving the goal of aspiration. Along with desire, Aristotle considered affects to be an important motivational principle. It was believed that in cases where the affective reaction is either excessive or insufficient, a person acts badly. Extremes are immoral. But there is a “golden mean” between them. The optimal state when it comes to money is generosity, while the negative poles are either wastefulness or stinginess.
Plato assigned the control of impulses to the power of reason. According to Aristotle, a person is able to develop the correct affects thanks to his personal experience and systematic training. The education of feelings is accomplished through actions. Thus, the motive was endowed with a moral sign that determined the meaning of the real action - the deed. The act itself acquired the role of the creative principle of character (personality). The relationship between reason and affect occupied a significant place in the psychological views of philosophical schools during the Hellenistic period. The Stoic school, in particular, rejected Plato's division of the soul into rational and irrational. All mental processes were considered intelligent. Passions, desires, affects were attributed to the incorrect activity of thinking, as a result of which they become painful states of the soul. The mind, which was seen as the main therapeutic agent, can get rid of them. Finally, in the era of the collapse of ancient civilization, in the teachings of Augustine, instead of thinking and affects (emotions), the main motivating force of the actions of the soul is a special, alien to everything material, willpower, which disposes of the brain, sensory organs and movements as its tools. All other mental processes arise and change due to purely spiritual volitional activity. It turns the soul towards itself, becoming a source of awareness by the individual of his inner experience. Voluntarism dates back to Augustine, adopted in subsequent centuries by a number of teachings about the motivational priority of will in the mental organization of man. The concept of voluntariness was associated with those processes in the body that are regulated by the conscious goal and spiritual acts of the subject as the final causal authority. Psychological considerations were correlated with the global philosophical and religious problem of free will.
The first sharp turn towards new explanations occurred with Descartes' discovery of the reflex nature of behavior in his doctrine of the passions. As noted, in relation to man, this teaching proclaimed uncompromising dualism. The material body appeared in the form of an automaton, set into motion by external impulses, the intermediate effect of which is perception and elementary feelings, and the final effect is the “bloating” of the muscles. But along with this, the organism is activated by the “radiations” of another, incorporeal substance, from which acts of consciousness and will, as well as higher intellectual feelings, emanate. Cartesian dualism reigned over minds for three centuries. Its reflection ultimately became the version about the need for “two psychologies” - explanatory, which sees the causes of the phenomena being studied in bodily mechanics, and descriptive (or understanding), intuitively penetrating mental life in order to comprehend its uniqueness, its illumination by the richness of cultural values.
However, already in Cartesian times a majestic attempt was made to explain with geometric rigor, guided not by intuition, but by illogical analysis, the motives of human behavior as a bodily-spiritual being. This attempt belonged to Descartes' opponent Spinoza. He rejected the belief that the will is an independent causal entity. The illusion of free will is the result of ignorance of the true reasons. These reasons are affects. By them they did not mean the Cartesian “passions” (that is, passive states) of the soul, which, arising in the body, can only be the result of what it experiences; serve as a motive for his actions, they are powerless to influence them. Affects, according to Spinoza, are special bodily-mental states. There are a great many of them. Spinoza, turning to affects, saw the task of philosophy as, relentlessly following the principle of causality, to explain the purpose of affects as the driving forces of human existence. Spinoza proposed a strictly objective study of affects instead of collecting information about how they are experienced by the subject experiencing them. Considering them in an objective system of relations, he reduced the wealth of affects to three main ones, whose names are: attraction, sadness and joy. He endowed affects with actual influence on the organism (body), believing that sadness reduces the body’s ability to act, while joy increases it. Spinoza's most important innovations: an approach to affects from a position that rejects the dualism of the physical and spiritual, giving them a real causal role in life - prompted L.S. Vygotsky to think about the prospect of creating a theory that can apply Spinoza’s ideas to modern psychoneurology.
Freud translated Darwin's conclusions about instinct and the objective nature of motivations inherent in the depths of life from biological language into psychological language, developing his theory of motivation. He transferred it to a new plane, relating it to the problems of the structure and development of the human psyche. And then a completely different situation developed than in the directions where the motivating principle of behavior was seen from the angle of its biological nature. In relation to man, it was impossible to eliminate the question of the role of consciousness. And the very first Freudian conclusion was captured by the version about the conflict between the voice of consciousness and the power of deep unconscious drives hidden from it. Brought up in his youth on the ideas of the strictest determinism, Freud insisted that any mental phenomena in the structure, even seemingly absurd personalities or irrational, random or meaningless, are strictly determined by the play of latent mental forces (sexual or aggressive drives). Fleeing from them, a human being creates a “dam” for these blind psychic elements in the form of various protective mechanisms, the most important of which is the mechanism of repression. Repressed attraction, faced with the censorship of consciousness, looks for various workarounds and is discharged in forms that are outwardly neutral, sometimes even meaningless, but have their own symbolic plan. Psychoanalysis began to solve them, interpreting dreams, studying various slips and errors of memory, unusual associations (connections) of thoughts. Why did consciousness, which after Darwin and Spencer began to be recognized as a tool of adaptation to the environment, a means of the most effective adaptation to external forces threatening the body, acted as a tool for neutralizing internal forces? Because Freud introduced into his construction a social factor opposed to everything instinctive-biological in man. Social norms, prohibitions, and sanctions also have motivational power. They force a person to unconsciously be cunning, to deceive himself and others about his true motives. An analysis of the complex motivational structure of personality led Freud to a three-component model of its structure as dynamic and initially conflicting. Conflict appeared in the clash of unconscious drives with the power of the “I”, armed with its own tools of self-defense, and the pressure of the super-“I” (an authority representing society as a principle hostile to the individual).
Along with Freud, Kurt Lewin significantly enriched the category of motive. He was close to Gestalt theory with its enthusiasm for revolutionary events in physics, where the concept of field was established. But the Gestaltists focused their efforts on developing the category of image, while Lewin turned to the dynamics of motives in individual and then collective behavior. Like Freud, Lewin took the path of developing the principle of mental causation. Given objectively, like biological and social causality, it is different from them. At the same time, precisely because of its objectivity, it acted in an interpretation that made it possible to overcome the version of a “closed mental series”, where the same phenomenon of the subject’s consciousness (a volitional impulse, an image of a goal, a sensory impulse, an act of apperception) produces another. One response was Lewin's concept of motivation. According to this concept, the driving factor of behavior (regardless of whether it is realized or not) is the motivational tension of the living space, which has its own laws of transformation, different from the laws by which associations arise, connections between stimuli and reactions, etc. The search for the objective dynamics of motives as an indispensable determinant of behavior brought Lewin closer to Freud. But in many ways they disagreed. Freud was focused on the history of personality. He reduced motivation to several global drives, the objects of which are fixed in childhood. Based on this, it was assumed that a person’s current motivation is determined by his long-standing “complexes,” “fixations,” and “substitutions.” Hence the focus of psychoanalysis - to “unearth” the distant past of the individual. Unlike Freud, Lewin taught that behavior can be explained only from the relationships that a person develops with his immediate, specific environment in a given micro-interval of time. Past experience can influence the subject only if the relevance of this experience “here and now” remains. There is a general motivational dynamic. Therefore, Levin used such well-known manifestations of organic need as hunger, satiety, satiety for an experimental study of the motives that drive subjects when performing tasks that do not have a biological plan (when reading poetry, drawing.
Behind abstraction, a seemingly calm and dispassionate function of the mind, there is always a certain direction of behavior, thought and activity, wrote Ukhtomsky. With the transition to man, along with the reality of the transformed nature, a fundamentally new form arises - the reality of human faces (personalities). And here, according to Ukhtomsky, a great revolution takes place in the psychological experience organized by the dominant. Usually, when talking about changes in the psyche during the “human phase,” the main emphasis is on intellectual structures—thinking and speech (“second signals”). Ukhtomsky brings to the fore the emergence of new dominants (motivational attitudes) generated by a new reality, namely the personal-human one. Believing that human nature can be done and cultivated, Ukhtomsky meant not only the enrichment of the body with new information and not only the construction of new ways (techniques) of action, but above all the creation of new motivational structures. As for the main trend in the development of motives, it is expansion in the sense of mastering the environment on ever-expanding spatio-temporal scales (“chronotope”), and not reduction as the desire for “protection” from the environment, balance with it, and release of internal tension. The concept of “operational rest” was essentially new in the interpretation of motivational activity. This form of activity was seen not only in motor reactions to the environment (no matter how rapid and restless they may be), but also in a special, concentrated contemplation of the environment with an extreme concentration of energy, which requires significantly greater neuropsychic tension than muscle operations, and provides subtlety and precision of reception unattainable through these operations.
The concept of dominance, developed by Ukhtomsky, was not tied to this fundamental level of biological motivation and therefore opened the way to research into the drives inherent in human existence in the world. The originality of Ukhtomsky’s biography (he graduated from theological academy before becoming a physiologist) directed his thought to the search for those circumstances of the motivational intensity of an individual’s behavior that are caused by his absorption in communication with other people and the highest spiritual values.
The use of new electrophysiological and biochemical methods for studying the brain undermined the idea of the body as an inert system, removed from an equilibrium state only under the influence of external shocks. The brain showed electrical activity even when it was not bombarded with environmental stimuli. Not only the dependence of the brain on reception (the perception of incoming signals from the outside), but also reception on the brain became more and more obvious. External stimulation (afferent excitation) is superimposed on existing excitation in the central nervous system. Research (in particular, experiments on “sensory isolation” by the American psychologist Hebb) has shown that isolating a person from sensory stimuli becomes an obstacle to mental work. This indicated that the senses not only inform about the environment, but also keep the brain active. Under conditions of “sensory hunger” (when the subject’s organs of visual, auditory, and tactile sensations are isolated from external signals), a person begins to hallucinate. Consequently, the brain itself produces traces of previous impressions. These facts cannot be combined with the idea of the brain as a transmission station between stimulus and response, with the hypothesis that life activity is subordinated to one goal - the elimination of stimuli. Some biological concepts, such as, for example, the doctrine of stress put forward by the Canadian scientist G. Selye, also testified against homeostasis as the only explanatory principle of behavior. Under conditions of great stress (nervous, muscular, excessive cooling or overheating, etc.), homeostatic mechanisms cannot operate smoothly. The body responds to traumatic stimuli (stressors) with a set of special adaptation-protective reactions. First, a state of anxiety arises (“alarm reaction”), in which adaptation to threatening stimuli has not yet been achieved. Then the mobilization of forces occurs and the stage of resistance begins. It is replaced by a stage of exhaustion, when the adaptation that was achieved is lost. Like the concept of attitude, the concept of psychological stress included the individual's readiness to respond to a significant stimulus. At the same time, this is an emotional, affective readiness associated with the mobilization of all the physiological resources of the body in order to withstand a formidable test. Psychology is constantly influenced by general biological concepts and relies on them.
The body needs to maintain the excitation of its activating system, although not excessively, but at a level high enough for successful adaptation to the environment. And this is possible only when the “sensory hunger” is satisfied, that is, the need for new external stimuli, when the old, familiar ones cease to “sate.” Of course, the principle of homeostasis does not thereby lose its significance, but it turns out to be insufficient to explain the motivation of behavior. There are demands to reconsider the traditional concept of motivation, which limits its origins to the biological needs of the body. Chronologically, they date back to the middle of our century, and we have reason to believe that shifts in the interpretation of motivation, being determined by the specific scientific achievements of neurophysiology, comparative, experimental, and clinical psychology, do not coincidentally fall on this period. They are associated with fundamental changes in the content, structure and scale of scientific and technical activity, which have significantly increased the requirements for the capabilities of the human personality, its activity and independence, and have given greater relevance to the problems of the psychology of creativity. McLelland's experiments revealed the realistic attitude of consciousness, its focus on reproducing actions that can satisfy a need. The stronger the motive, the more often the subjects imagined various ways to successfully achieve the goal. From goals associated with organic needs, McLelland moved to higher ones, reflecting the value orientation of the individual. At the same time, he discovered large differences between the subjects regarding the strength of the achievement motive that arose in them. The transition from biological to social explanations was symptomatic. The category of motive, like other parts of the categorical apparatus of psychology, absorbs features that are “detected” by scientific thought in communication with the reality under study. This reality in our case is a system of special, object-oriented energy-dynamic relations of the subject with reality, given by the interaction of natural and sociocultural principles in his mental organization.
Motivation and motivesE. P. Ilyin, 2011
7.2. The problem of polymotivation of behavior and activity
For a long time, the relationship between motive and behavior (activity) was considered from a monomotivational position. Based on the fact that motive is a system-forming factor in activity and behavior, psychologists closely tie them to a specific need (taken as a motive). This is expressed in the thesis: each motive (need) must have its own activity, and vice versa. For example, D. N. Uznadze writes: “... there is no one and the same behavior that could have different motives. It would be more correct to say that there are as many behaviors as there are motives that give them meaning and meaning” (1966, p. 403).
From this understanding of the relationship between motive and behavior (activity), notes I. V. Imedadze (1984), three consequences follow. The first is the formula: one motive - one activity. Secondly, the motive names the activity and, thanks to this, acts as a criterion for distinguishing various types and forms of behavior. The third consequence is that the motive determines the meaningful characteristics of the activity.
However, in recent years, among many domestic psychologists, the point of view has become widespread that human activity and behavior are determined simultaneously by many motives (L. I. Bozhovich, V. K. Vilyunas, I. V. Imedadze, V. I. Kovalev, A. N. Leontyev, V. F. Petrenko, M. M. Filippov). A. N. Leontyev, for example, putting forward the proposition that activity is multimotivated, starts from the fact that complex forms of behavior and activity, as a rule, are motivated by several needs. The first version of polymotivation, according to A. N. Leontiev, consists in conditioning educational activities by both cognitive and social motives, giving this activity a double meaning. The second version of polymotivation is a combination of a meaning-forming motive, which performs the function of motivation, direction and meaning formation, with incentive motives, which play the role of only additional stimulation of a given activity.
Psychologists have become so confident in the infallibility of the postulate that activity and behavior are multimotivated that they consider it axiomatic. For example, V.K. Vilyunas writes: “In humans, the simultaneous manifestation and action of motivational factors of various origins represents an almost constant background of life. Therefore, it is not the statement of the multimotivation of human activity itself that is relevant, but the problem of its forms and mechanisms” (1990, p. 187). But, perhaps, in its most extreme manifestation, this view is expressed by A. Maslow, who believes that any behavior shows a tendency to be determined by several or all basic needs at the same time, rather than by just one of them.
An attempt to understand how consistent this and that position of psychologists is was made by I. V. Imedadze (1984). Criticizing the monomotivational position of a number of psychologists, he notes that with the objective-need interpretation of motive, the requirement that each activity have its own motive turns into a search for a specific need for each activity, and this leads to an inadequate interpretation of what a person does. For example, he continues, labor, being a special form of activity, must have its own need (the need for labor, that is, in the direct process or result of labor). But such a need, according to the classics of Marxism, will arise in a person only in a communist society. And it turns out that a modern person can work conscientiously all his life without having such a need and, therefore, without carrying out labor activity (based on the formula that each need must have its own activity). The illegality of such an interpretation, notes I. V. Imedadze, has been shown by a number of authors.
Thus, concludes I. V. Imedadze, when identifying needs and motives, it becomes impossible to implement the position “one motive - one activity,” since everyone knows that one activity, as a rule, is prompted by several needs. In this regard, he talks about the multi-need nature of activity and behavior.
It seems to me that here I.V. Imedadze was somewhat overzealous in his criticism. Already his reservation about his thesis (“usually...”) suggests that in some cases (and perhaps much more often) between the type of need (motive) and the type of activity there may be both substantive and semantic similarities, i.e. That is, the position “one motive - one activity” may reflect reality. Another thing is that the name of the activity often does not imply the same name of the need that determined it (for example, the mention of “sports activity” does not at all indicate that the person engaged in it has a “sports” need, or that commercial activity is determined by a commercial need) . And this is precisely where the discrepancy between the type of activity and the type of need may manifest itself.
In addition, he, in essence, does not deny the formula: “one motive - one activity,” but simply looks more correctly at the structure of the motive. Thus, denying the identity of need and motive, I. V. Imedadze considers it as the basis of behavior (activity) on the part of the subject, which must take into account the entire content of the activity: both emotional-need and cognitive-situational. A person takes into account the situation, the presence of objective and subjective possibilities, the presence of opposing needs. Therefore, the motive in I. V. Imedadze’s view is a complex structure that cannot be reduced to any one need.
He insists that activity can be determined by many needs, which, coexisting within the same activity and establishing various relationships with each other, create a single motive, serving one integral goal. In confirmation of this, we can cite the statement of L. I. Bozhovich: “A mark as a motive for educational activity can embody the need for the teacher’s approval, and the need to be at the level of one’s own self-esteem, and the desire to gain the authority of comrades, and the desire to make it easier for oneself to enter a university.” higher education institution, and many other needs” (1972, p. 27).
It should be noted that in many cases we are talking about polymotivation only because not only needs, but also various motivators are taken as motives.
Therefore, it would be more accurate to talk about the multimotivational nature of behavior and activity. In Western psychology, the emphasis is mainly on the simultaneous conditioning of behavior and activity by many goals or personal dispositions (J. Atkinson [J. Atkinson, 1964]; J. O. Raynor [J. Raynor, 1969]; H. Heckhausen, 1986 , and etc.). Thus, in many cases, the authors essentially talk about the mythical phenomenon of polymotivation due to the fact that the motive is understood too narrowly: either as a need, or as a goal, or as one of the motivators.
At the same time, like I.V. Imedadze, I think it is possible to talk about true polymotivation. I. V. Imedadze writes in this regard that, in the strict sense of the word, we deal with polymotivation only when several motives operate simultaneously, each of which may include many needs. However, in this case, several activities are actually carried out psychologically, each of which has its own motive.
True polymotivation, in my opinion, occurs when a person achieves a distant goal, for example, in the process of educational (getting an education) or sports (achieving a record result) activity, which is guided by a long-term motivational setting. Both educational and sports activities are associated with a number of private activities, each of which is stimulated and justified by motives specific to the general direction of behavior. They are, as it were, built into a general motive and, being relatively independent psychological formations, contribute to the achievement of the final goal.
“Built-in” are essentially the motives for activities related to making money. In this case, too, there is no direct connection between human needs and the objects to satisfy them. It is mediated by a number of activities that have their own motives. Thus, on the way to achieving a distant goal, but the main goal at this stage of a person’s life, a chain of such “built-in” motives can be built, the implementation of which will steadily bring the person closer to the cherished goal.
