Understanding Motivation: Types, Characteristics, and Patterns

Understanding Motivation

The behavior is motivated.

If you ask a student why they remain in class hour after hour, day after day, week after week for years, what would they answer? Maybe: "I want to graduate," "I want to be a professional," "I want to be somebody," "I hope to earn lots of money," or "I hope to be a great researcher," or something similar.

That's why psychologists say that behavior is motivated.

Motivation Defined

The terms motivate, motive, and motivation come from the Latin verb "movere," which means to incite or move to action. Certainly, when a person has a goal, they do something to achieve it.

The term motivation is used generically to describe the conditions or states that activate or energize the body and lead to implementing a behavior directed toward some goal.

Characteristics of Motivated Behavior

1. Cyclical: Once the reason arises, behavior is directed to satisfy (or reduce) it, obtaining the corresponding incentive, thus eliminating the reason and ending the activity.
2. Selective: Hunger is satisfied with food and thirst with water.
3. Active and Persistent: While the need is not met, or at least reduced, the subject will remain active as their body resists.
4. Homeostatic or Balancing: It returns the body to a state of equilibrium.

Force of Motives

Motives are the triggers of behavior. However, people (and animals) possess multiple motives. All of them influence behavior.

Motivational Patterns

As noted, a person has multiple needs at once, requiring satisfaction. These needs may increase or decrease in strength and create different patterns on the same day or even manifest a particular pattern for longer periods of life.

Complexity of Motivated Behavior

While recognizing that people differ in their motives, that these are patterns that can be altered, and that the force of the motives changes considerably, it can be hard to explain the behavior of individuals based on their motives, or based on incentives or goals.

Reasons for Complexity

1. Motives cannot be observed directly, but are inferred from behavior.
2. The same motive can be expressed with different behaviors.
3. Different motives can be expressed with the same behavior.
4. Motives are framed.
5. The expression of motives is different from one culture to another, and within the same culture, from one group to another, and even from one person to another.

Diversity of Motives

There are few areas of psychology with as much diversity of opinion as this. There are several thousands of terms that express motives. It is not necessary to learn them all.

Physiological and Social Motives

Motives can be classified easily and provisionally into two groups:

1. Physiological Motives: Also known as survival motives or organic needs, they are related to self-regulation processes in the body. They are innate and involve a sense of urgency when they appear. These include hunger, thirst, sex drive, temperature regulation, sleep-activity cycle, respiration, and the avoidance of pain.
2. Social Motives: These are learned and are related to group life and interactions among individuals, such as affiliation, esteem, dominance, aggression, achievement, competition, and others.

Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs

Maslow (1970) classifies human needs into five categories, which are described below:

Hierarchy of Needs

1. Physiological Needs: This group includes hunger, thirst, shelter, breathing, rest, and other necessities required to keep the body in a steady state.
2. Security Needs: Security means both physical and psychological safety. This group includes the need to protect the body from external risks that may cause injury, and to avoid threats to one's personality.
3. The Need to Belong and Love: Some call this the "need for belonging or affiliation."
4. The Need for Esteem: This includes the desire for self-respect, power, achievement, adequacy, wisdom, competence, confidence, independence, and freedom, as well as the desire for reputation, prestige, respect, and esteem from others.
5. The Need for Self-Actualization: This concerns the desire that people feel to self-fulfill, i.e., the tendency to realize one's potential.