Systems approaches to the treatment of motivation in human action: Three notes

Baumeister’s energizing call-to-arms suggests theorists might wish to adopt more “radical” approaches toward theorizing about the role of motivation in human action. By radical, I mean re-igniting strands of theoretical analysis that were once more common in psychological scholarship but which have fallen to the wayside. At the heart of this argument is the proposal that theorists adopt an explicit systems approach to the study of motivation. Motivation would be neither a property of the organism potentially harboring it nor of the environment that triggers it. Instead, the complex interplay between the organism and environment would be the primary object of analysis. With this in mind, it would be wise to make three specific three notes. First, people are motivated not only by what they want to do, they literally feel anxious to avoid undesired actions and outcomes, too. Second, adaptive motivation would likely match motive to affordances in the environment that aid in motivational pursuits. Third, it might be important to identify a basic level in motivations, the level of motivational specificity containing the motives that predominantly drive human action.