In this video I discuss how motivations may be conscious or unconscious influences on behavior. I describe some of the unconscious motivations proposed by Henry Murray and David McClelland and how external conditions may activate motivations. Next I describe the distinction between approach and avoidance motivations and how these may conflict with one another, either in approach–approach conflict, avoidance–avoidance conflict, or approach–avoidance conflict.
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Video Transcript
Hi, I’m Michael Corayer and this is Psych Exam Review. In the previous videos I’ve talked about intrinsic and extrinsic motivations and the idea that there are ironic effects of rewards and punishments on motivation, and you may have been wondering how much people know this is happening. So when we talk about something like the overjustification effect or the idea of insufficient justification, you might wonder if people are really aware of these influences on their motivation and on their behavior.
So this brings us to the distinction between conscious and unconscious motivations. Now the idea is we have conscious motivations, things that we’re aware of, that we know are influencing our behavior. We know that we want certain things, but we might have motivations that are happening unconsciously; that we don’t have conscious access to and we don’t realize are influencing our behavior. This should remind you of what I talked about in a previous video on dual-process theory; the idea that we have this system one which is the conscious system that’s processing information but then we also have system two which is processing information at an unconscious level.
Now one of the first theorists to suggest the idea of unconscious motivations on behavior was Henry Murray. And here’s a picture of Murray here and one of the unconscious motivations that Murray proposed was what he called the “need for achievement“. The idea of a need for achievement is that people have a motivation, a drive to accomplish tasks to gain mastery over things and to win. And so Murray suggested that people with a high need for achievement would seek out challenges of intermediate difficulty and the idea is that they wouldn’t seek out things that were too easy because that wouldn’t bring them a sense of accomplishment or a sense of achievement. And they would also avoid things that were going to be too difficult, things that might be too challenging because if there’s a chance that they won’t win or that they won’t be able to master these tasks or accomplish them that this won’t satisfy this unconscious need for achievement.
And you might recall Henry Murray’s name because I talked about him in the unit on personality because he was the creator of the Thematic Apperception Test and this is a personality test. It’s a projective technique where people look at these ambiguous situations and they tried generate explanations of who these people are and what they’re doing what their relationship is and so Murray thought that these types of tasks could help to reveal the unconscious motivations that were shaping someone’s personality and shaping someone’s behavior.
Now another researcher that continued some of Murray’s ideas is David McClelland and McClelland proposed some other unconscious motivations that shaped people’s behavior. These included a need for power, a need for affiliation, and a need for recognition, and McClelland also recognized that sometimes external conditions can activate certain motivations and this again could be happening unconsciously. We might not be aware that this is occurring.
So, for instance, in the case of a need for recognition, one external condition which McClelland called a “press” that could activate this motivation might be seeing somebody else win an award or seeing somebody else be honored. The idea is this might activate your unconscious need for recognition. Now we can also think about how external conditions can activate motivations if we think about something like hunger. So maybe seeing appetizing food, seeing advertisements for food, or seeing a dessert menu in a restaurant might influence your feeling of hunger either consciously or perhaps even unconsciously. And this would be another example of a “press”.
Now another way that we can think about motivations, either conscious or unconscious motivations, is to divide them up into approach motivations and avoidance motivations. So this idea is that an approach motivation is a motivation towards experiencing something positive, and getting some positive experience would be an approach motivation. But that we also have motivations to avoid negative outcomes so an avoidance motivation is to not experience something bad. And we can see that these different approach and avoidance motivations may have different relative strengths. What I mean by that is that the same thing, whether you’re going to maybe win or lose that thing, might not be the same if it’s a win or a loss.
Ok, so what do I mean? This brings us to behavioral economics and some of the research by Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman that I’ve talked about in previous videos. So in one study Tversky and Kahneman asked people if they wanted to play a coin flip game and in this coin flip if you win you get $10 but if you lose it costs $8. Now this is actually a game that rationally you should play because you have 50/50 odds of winning or losing and you win more than you lose. And so rationally you should want to play this game. But what Tversky and Kahneman found is that most people didn’t want to play this game. And so what they proposed is the idea that losses feel worse than games feel good, right? So in other words, if it was the same amount of money, winning $10 doesn’t feel as strong as losing $10 feels. In fact, winning $10 isn’t even as strong as losing $8. Alright, so the idea is that losses feel very strong to us. We want to avoid losses and this relates to some other things Tversky and Kahneman wrote about; prospect theory and also relates to things like the sunk cost fallacy that I’ve talked about in a previous video. But we can also think about how this influences our motivations and our approach or avoidance motivations.
Now we also have conflict between these motivations. So there’s a few different types of conflict that we can have between our motivations. One type of conflict is called an approach–approach conflict. This is the idea where we have multiple desirable options but we can’t choose all of them. So, for instance, if you were going to go to the movie theater and see a movie, maybe there’s three movies that you want to see on that particular night. But, of course, you can’t see all of them. You can only watch one of the movies. So this would be an approach-approach conflict; you have multiple things that you want but you can only choose one of them. In economic terms we might refer to this as the opportunity cost of seeing one of the movies is that you can’t see the other two movies. So it costs you something to see them.
Now another way we can have a conflict is what’s called an avoidance–avoidance conflict. And this is a case where we have all negative outcomes so we don’t want any of the choices and yet we have to have one of them. And so you might think about when you have to do your chores at home and you might say “well, I can vacuum the floor, which I don’t want to do, or I can clean the windows, which I don’t want to do. I can clean the bathroom, which I don’t want to do, and wash the dishes. Like, I don’t want to do any of these things but I have to do something.” They’re all negative outcomes and so I have this avoidance-avoidance conflict in trying to choose which one.
And then lastly we have what’s called approach–avoidance conflict and this is the idea that one of the choices includes both positive and negative motivations. There’s an approach motivation involved, but there’s also an avoidance motivation involved and we can’t separate them out. Sort of a package deal, right? We get all of these things in making that choice even though we don’t want some of them.
So one way that I like to think about this one is going to a party. So you get invited to some party this weekend and, on the one hand, you say, “okay, some of my good friends are going. It’ll be fun, I’ll have a good time with them”. And so that’s an approach motivation. “I want to go because I’ll have this good experience”. But at the same time I know if I go to the party there’s going to be some people there that I don’t particularly like and I’m gonna have to interact with them. And that’s maybe an avoidance motivation. I would rather not talk to these people or spend time with them, and yet, if I go to the party I’m going to have to do that, right? I can’t only go to the party with the friends I want to go with. The other people are also going to be there. Or you could think about other possible avoidance motivations for something like going to a party and that maybe it’s, it’s far away, it’s annoying to get there, it’s going to be difficult, you know? And so you want to avoid that. But of course you want to have the positive experience of getting there, you know? You can think about traveling somewhere which it’s really difficult to get to some location, but you really want to go there to experience it, right? That would be an example of approach-avoidance conflict in your motivations.
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