The Behaviorists

The behavioral approach to motivation is centrally concerned with rewards
and punishments. People cultivate behaviors for which they are rewarded.
They avoid behaviors that experience has shown them will result in pain or
punishment. B. F. Skinner (1904-1990) was probably the most influential behaviorist.
Many educators accepted his theories and applied them to social
as well as teaching situations.
Clark Hull (1884-1952), working experimentally with rats, determined
that animals deprived of such basic requirements as food or punished by
painful means such as electric shock, develop intense reactions to these
stimuli. John Dollard (1900-1980) and Neal Miller (1909-2002) extended
Hull’s work to human subjects. They discovered that the response elicited by
these means depends on the intensity of the stimulus, not on its origin. The
stimuli employed also evoke previously experienced stimulus-response reactions,
so that if subjects are hurt or punished following a volitional act, they
will in future avoid such an act. In other words, if the negative stimuli are
rapidly reduced, the responses that immediately preceded the reduction are
reinforced. These researchers concluded that physiological needs such as
hunger are innate, whereas secondary drives and the reaction to all drives,
through conditioning, are learned.
Ivan Pavlov (1849-1936) demonstrated the strength of conditioned responses
in his renowned experiments with dogs. He arranged for a bell to
sound immediately before the dogs in his experiment were fed. The dogs
came to associate the sound of a bell with being fed, a pleasurable and satisfying
experience. Eventually, when Pavlov rang the bell but failed to follow
its ringing with feeding, the dogs salivated merely on hearing the sound, because
they anticipated the feeding to which they had become conditioned.
Over time, the motivation to satisfy their hunger came to be as much related
to hearing the bell as it was to their actually being fed. Pavlovian conditioning
is directly related to motivation, in this case the motivation to satisfy hunger.