Motivation by ideal

Moral ideals should not be seen as simple and purely personal, but as complex values with a social dimension that transcend attempts to formulate or realize them. Orientation towards ideals needs a realistic component: people should identify with the quest for an ideal, not with the ideal itself, and consider the possibility of negative consequences of their pursuit. Such realism about ideals includes acknowledging that ideals are not the only, nor the most important, motivating force of morality.     

Mapping Moral Motivation

In this paper we defend a version of moral internalism and a cognitivist account of motivation against recent criticisms. The internalist thesis we espouse claims that, if an agent believes she has reason to A, then she is motivated to A. Discussion of counter-examples has been clouded by the absence of a clear account of the nature of motivation. While we can only begin to provide such an account in this paper, we do enough to show that our version of internalism can be defended against putative counter-examples. All theories of motivation which take what motivates to be a psychological state run foul of the following plausible constraint: the reason why you ought to do an action and the reason why you do it can be the same. In our view, however, while what motivates is a reason (which is a fact) the state of being motivated is a cognitive stage, viz. the belief that one has reason to act. In cases where the agent's relevant beliefs are false, then she has no reason to act, but nontheless her action can be explained in other ways.     

内部动机、外部动机与创造力的关系研究

本研究以277名文科三、四年级的大学生为被试,综合考察在故事、连线和命名任务下,内部动机,外部动机对创造力表现的影响。多变量方差分析发现,对于三个测验的共同部分,内部动机和外部动机的主效应均显著,但交互作用不显著。分别对每个任务进行方差分析发现,对于连线任务而言,内部动机和外部动机的主效应均显著;对于命名任务而言,外部动机的主效应显著,内部动机的主效应不显著;对于故事任务而言,内部动机和外部动机的主效应不显著。内部动机与外部动机之间在三个任务中均不存在显著的交互作用。多重回归分析发现,对于不同的任务,内部动机与外部动机的贡献显著不同。     

Motivation and reinforcement

Pavlov (1954) considered the significance of various manifestations of the higher nervous system as a necessary preliminary condition of brain mechanisms. He wrote, “First of all it is important to comprehend psychologically and then translate into physiological language.” Unfortunately, there are no conventional definitions of such notions as need, motivation, emotion, reinforcement, consciousness, will, etc. I. M. Sechenov (1952) wrote, more than a century ago, “... try to speak about one and the same subject with psychologists of different schools—each school has a new opinion; and if you start, by comparison, a conversation about sound, light, electricity with a physicist of any country—you’ll receive, essentially, the same responses from all of them.” There is a need to create such theoretic conceptions which would be initially of an interdisciplinary character and would be useful not only in one, but in a number of special fields of science, such as psychology, physiology, and sociology. In this article the author suggests a brief dictionary of terms, based on the need-informational approach to the study of the psyche and behavior. These were created over the last 25 years (Simonov 1986).     

Motivation by Ideal

Abstract

I offer an account of how ideals motivate us. My account suggests that although emulating an ideal is often rational, it can lead us to do irrational things.     

Motivation for Parenthood

Summary: The relationships between the tendency of subjects to perceive temporal zones as interrelated or discrete and other temporal behaviors and personality factors were explored in two studies, one using 115 college students and the other 60 college students, employing the Personal Orientation Inventory the Temporal Orientation Inventory, and the Circles Test. Subjects who obtained higher time-relatedness scores were found to demonstrate greater self-actualization, evaluate the present time mode more positively, overestimate time intervals in an estimation task, and to perform less accurately in time estimation than low time relaters.     

Moral Motivation Pluralism

Motivational externalists and internalists of various sorts disagree about the circumstances under which it is conceptually possible to have moral opinions but lack moral motivation. Typically, the evidence referred to are intuitions about whether people in certain scenarios who lack moral motivation count as having moral opinions. People’s intuitions about such scenarios diverge, however. I argue that the nature of this diversity is such that, for each of the internalist and externalist theses, there is a strong prima facie reason to reject it. That much might not be very controversial. But I argue further, that it also gives us a strong prima facie reason to reject all of these theses. This is possible since there is an overlooked alternative option to accepting any of them: moral motivation pluralism, the view that different internalist and externalist theses correctly accounts for different people’s concepts of moral opinions, respectively. I end the paper with a discussion of methodological issues relevant to the argument for moral motivation pluralism and of the consequences of this view for theories about the nature of moral opinions, such as cognitivism and non-cognitivism.     

Dimensions of Reading Motivation: Development of an Adult Reading Motivation Scale

This study explored dimensions of adult reading motivation and collected reliability and validity information for a measure that assesses individual differences in adult reading motivation. Reading engagement theory provided the basis for an initial pool of items. A factor analysis showed that four dimensions, (a) reading as part of the self, (b) reading efficacy, (c) reading for recognition, and (d) reading to do well in other realms, accounted for a substantial amount of the variance in reading motivation. An overall reading motivation scale of 21 items with subscales representing the four dimensions was created using items with high factor loadings. The internal consistency of the total reading motivation scale was good and the internal consistencies of the subscales were reasonable. The total scale and subscales predicted reading enjoyment and time spent reading. A better understanding of adult reading motivation may aid those who support adult readers.     

The Nature of Motivation

Summary

Studies of physical proximity as an index of attraction frequently report sex differences, and data concerning proximity to the opposite sex are somewhat ambiguous. In the present study it was hypothesized that both males and females place themselves in closer proximity to a liked than to a disliked member of the opposite sex and that the arousal of negative affect is inversely related to physical proximity. Attraction to an opposite sex stranger was manipulated by means of false attitude information. A chisquare analysis indicated a highly significant relationship between attitude similarity and seating distance for both sexes. Analysis of variance supported the proposed relationship between seating distance and self-reported feelings of anxiety, hostility, and depression.     

Sartre's Theory of Motivation

The aim of this article is to offer a novel reconstruction of Sartre's theory of motivation. I argue for four related claims: (a) Sartre's theory of motivation revolves around the Schelerian‐inspired notion of affectivity and the peculiar way affectivity provides us access to evaluative properties of the objects in our environment; (b) according to Sartre, the structure of intentional action, and in particular the act of choice and commitment to projects, is inextricably linked with “affectivity”; (c) the inextricable link between intentional action and affectivity is to be analyzed in terms of the fundamental structure of consciousness as being self‐present, thus making the agent nonpositionally aware of her choices and commitments; (d) an agent is motivated to act when her affective disclosure of value is in part constituted by the awareness of her commitments to relevant projects.     

动机的目标理论

章对动机的目标研究领域的发展脉络、研究方法以及所取得的新近成果进行综述,总结各种目标理论的共同点和分歧,并对这一领域的未来发展方向做出了展望。作认为,目标理论将导致行为的情感因素、动机力量与认知过程有机结合,这体现了一种整合趋势;同时,目标理论强调目标对于人格功能、情绪以及健康的重要性,使得该领域的研究与社会生活密切相联。而这一研究领域的未来方向则是,探查动机倾向与个人目标之间的联结。     

Intrinsic Motivation and Subjective Well-Being: The Unique Contribution of Intrinsic Religious Motivation

The purpose of this study was to determine if the frequently reported positive association between Intrinsic Religious Motivation (IRM) and Subjective Well-being (SWB) is explicable in terms of a more general intrinsic orientation to life that involves secular as well as religious domains. Measures of 3 distinct domains of intrinsic orientation (work, leisure, and religion) were administered to 161 college students along with 4 measures of SWB: satisfaction with life, purpose in life, self-efficacy, and negative affect. Four multiple regressions were performed, 1 to predict each measure of SWB, with the 3 intrinsic orientation scales, gender, and social desirability as the predictors in each regression. Intrinsic religiousness emerged as an independent predictor of satisfaction with life, purpose in life, and self-efficacy. Intrinsic religiousness appears to make a unique contribution to the prediction of SWB.     

The Spatial Power Motivation Scale: A Semi-Implicit Measure of Situational Power Motivation

We introduce a new nonverbal and unobtrusive measure to assess power motive activation, the Spatial Power Motivation Scale (SPMS). The unique features of this instrument are that it is (a) very simple and economical, (b) reliable and valid, and (c) sensitive to situational changes. Study 1 demonstrates the instrument's convergent and discriminant validity with explicit measures. Study 2 demonstrates the instrument's responsiveness to situational power motive salience: anticipating and winning competition versus losing competition and watching television. Studies 3 and 4 demonstrate that thoughts of competition result in higher power motivation specifically for individuals with a high dispositional power motive.     

Refining the Prediction of Effort: Brehm's Distinction between Potential Motivation and Motivation Intensity

It is self‐evident that resource allocation is better understood when a distinction is made between what people are willing to do to achieve a purpose and what they will do to achieve the purpose. Yet, motivation theorists have largely ignored this distinction in attempting to understand effort aspects of motivated behavior. An exception is Brehm, who has distinguished potential motivation from motivation intensity. Potential motivation refers to the upper limit of what people would be willing to do to satisfy a motive. It is proposed to vary with factors traditionally thought to determine motive strength (importance). Motivation intensity refers to effort and is proposed to vary proximally with the difficulty of instrumental behavior, first rising and then falling precipitously. In this article, I discuss Brehm's distinction and elaborate on its significance.