motivation |
Working Definition:
"The impetus that gives purpose or direction to human or animal behavior and operates at a conscious or unsconscious level." APA
Disciplinary Definitions:
McClelland, Human Motivation, 87/00
- Motive: “a recurrent concern for a goal state based on a natural incentive—a concern that energizes, orients, and selects behavior” 590
- motivation: “… the personal determinants of a behavioral outcome can be broken down into motivational variables, skill or trait variables, and cognitive variables (beliefs, expectations, or understandings). 6
Motivation has to do with “how behavior gets started, is energized, is sustained, is directed, is stopped.” Marshall Jones, “Introduction” to the Nebraska Symposium on Motivation, 55 [??]
Aronson, et. al, suggest that “discomfort and arousal” are the largely what motivates people to change attitudes or behaviors (Aronson, Social Pyschology, 1999, 216). In this chapter, discomfort is understood in terms of cognitive dissonance theory wherein the dissonance occurs as a result of the clash between what you do and your self-concept.
Comments:
In narratology motivation is "the complex of circumstances, reasons, purposes, and impulses governing a character's actions (and making them plausible). Prince, A Dictionary of Narratology
Notes
For McClelland - motivational variables: (6-15) are
- “conscious intent” e.g., goal setting, which is influenced by motive dispositions, the value of the task, the perceived difficulty (measured against previous experiences of skills), and “the fact that the task is there to be done
- “unconscious intent”
- “… we must distinguish between a motive—conceived as a disposition or trait—and motivation –conceived as a motive disposition aroused at a particular moment in time.” (85)
- motivation: short-term situational influences like food, variety, requests for obedience, or electric shock that arouse approach or avoidance behavior immediately. Personality theorists or clinicians typically think in terms of motives, that is, stable dispositions that organize or explain much of what a person says or does. (173)
- 174: stimulus situations: “when a variety of cues consistently arouses a class of incentives or goals, we may speak of a motive having been formed”
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last revised:
June 13, 2007
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