Describe an activity you enjoy (and engage in consistently) and discuss your motivation for engaging in that activity by applying the concepts discussed in Chapter 9. Provide specific examples to support your response.
Psychologists today define motivation as a need or desire that energizes and directs behavior. Our motivations arise from the interplay between nature (the bodily "push") and nurture (the "pulls" from our thought processes and culture).
In their attempts to understand motivated behavior, psychologists have viewed it from four perspectives:
Instinct theory (now replaced by the evolutionary perspective) focuses on genetically predisposed behaviors.
Drive-reduction theory focuses on how we respond to our inner pushes.
Arousal theory focuses on finding the right level of stimulation.
Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of needs focuses on the priority of some needs over others.
Instincts and Evolutionary Psychology
Early in the twentieth century, as the influence of Charles Darwin's evolutionary theory grew, it became fashionable to classify all sorts of behaviors as instincts. If people criticized themselves, it was because of their "self-abasement instinct." If they boasted, it reflected their "self-assertion instinct." After scanning 500 books, one sociologist compiled a list of 5759 supposed human instincts!
Before long, this instinct-naming fad collapsed under its own weight. Rather than explaining human behaviors, the early instinct theorists were simply naming them. It was like "explaining" a bright child's low grades by labeling the child an "underachiever." To name a behavior is not to explain it.
To qualify as an instinct, a complex behavior must have a fixed pattern throughout a species and be unlearned (Tinbergen, 1951). Such behaviors are common in other species. Newly hatched ducks and geese form attachments to the first moving object they see.
And mature salmon swim hundreds of miles upstream to reach the place where they were born, where they will mate and then die. Some human behaviors, such as infants' innate reflexes for rooting and sucking, also exhibit unlearned fixed patterns, but many more are directed by both physiological needs and psychological wants.
Instinct theory failed to explain most human motives, but its underlying assumption continues in evolutionary psychology: Genes do predispose some species-typical behavior.
Psychologists apply evolutionary psychology when exploring our human similarities, such as why we tend to share many fears, helping behaviors, and romantic attractions.