Motivation

Type of psychology: Biological bases of behavior; emotion; learning;
memory; motivation; social psychology
Fields of study: Attitudes and behavior; aversive conditioning;
behavioral and cognitive models; cognitive learning; methodological
issues; motivation theory; Pavlovian conditioning; personality theory;
social motives
Central to the study of psychology is motivation, which is fundamentally concerned
with emotion, personality, learning, memory, and gaining an understanding of how
behavior is most effectively activated, organized, and directed toward the achievement
of goals.

Key concepts
• activation theory
• behavioral approach
• cognitive approach
• hedonistic theory
• humanistic approach
• hydraulic model
• incentive theory
• Pavlovian conditioning
• psychodynamic approach
• teacher expectations
Research in motivation is pivotal to such fields as educational psychology, social
psychology, behavioral psychology, and most other subareas of psychology.
Motivation is centrally concerned with the goals people set for themselves
and with the means they take to achieve these goals. It is also
concerned with how people react to and process information, activities directly
related to learning. Motivation to process information is influenced
by two major factors: the relevance of the topic to the person processing the
information, which affects the willingness to think hard about the topic; and
the need for cognition, or the willingness to think hard about varied topics,
whether they are directly relevant or not. The relevance of a topic is central
to people’s motivation to learn about it.

For example, if the community in which a person lives experiences a severe
budgetary crisis that will necessitate a substantial increase in property taxes,
every resident in that community, home owners and renters alike, is going to
be affected directly or indirectly by the increase. Because this increase is relevant
to all the residents, they will, predictably, be much concerned with the
topic and will likely think hard about its salient details. If, on the other hand,
a community in a distant state faces such a crisis, residents in other communities,
reading or hearing about the situation, will not have the motivation to
do much hard thinking about it because it does not affect them directly.

The second category of motivation rests in the need of some individuals
for cognition. Their inherent curiosity will motivate them to think deeply
about various topics that do not concern them directly but that they feel a
need to understand more fully. Such people are deliberative, self-motivated
thinkers possessed of an innate curiosity about the world that surrounds
them. They generally function at a higher intellectual level than people who
engage in hard thinking primarily about topics that affect them directly.
One of the aims of education at all levels is to stimulate people to think
about a broad variety of topics, which they will do because they have an inherent
curiosity that they long to satisfy. 553