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02 September 2013

Theories Of Motivation

By David Johne


Motivation is basically a psychological factor or feature that induces any organism to take necessary actions to achieve certain objectives or goals. It brings out, controls, and maintains all the behaviors of any organism to achieve its goals. It is actually the driving force of the universe and organisms living in it.

The tripartite theory of soul expounded by Plato, the Greek philosopher of yore, is contained in his treatise, 'The Republic'. The theory of Plato is based on psyche, in which he divides the human soul into three parts, namely, the logical, the spirited, and the appetitive. He believes that these three parts correspond to the three different classes that could exist in a just society.

Extrinsic motivation allows people to perform activities with the explicit aim of attaining a specific outcome. The most common extrinsic motivating factors are either rewards for achieving something or threat of punishment for failure. Competition is a powerful extrinsic motivator, where an individual beats others and proves superiority, even though there might be no intrinsic motivator to win.

Logistikon discerns between the real things and the apparent and identifies truth and falsehood to make wise decisions on the basis of the love for goodness. The spirited part of soul brings out emotions like anger, hatred, etc. The appetitive part of soul allows us to experience various feelings such as hunger, thirst, carnal erotic love, and other desires like money making that are opposed to Logistikon. The appetitive part is the motivation for our actions.

Drive is a very powerful motivation for most of our actions, since drive stems from desire to fulfill a need or compensate a deficiency. This drive activates behavior in humans to achieve goals as mere incentives. The drive is usually a part of intrinsic motivator, without the requirement of any external stimuli to encourage specific behavior in an individual.

An example of such unconscious or conscious motivation is marriage or wedding. A person having genes that desire multiple partners would marry and then break up, rationalizing the behavior with a false conviction 'I loved the other person at that time'. As such, it is a deep subject in psychology that should be studied and analyzed carefully.




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