The article on McClelland was very dense, but I am hoping I can get something out of it. It states right away that all motives are learned. They are based on effective arousal which is what we would call emotion. However, according to this view, emotions are not motives, but the basis for motives. They give an example about happiness or pleasure, about when a person is experiencing this emotion, and something happens with an increase or decrease in pleasure, it gives anticipation to the person. It is the anticipatory goal response or redintegrated change in affective state which is the motive.
What are the conditions which give rise inntely to the states of effective arousal anticipation of which is assumed to be the motivation? One notion is adopted from Troland, to the effect that there is beneception sensory processes indicating a condition favorable to survival of the indicidual or species and nociception (sensory processes indicating a condition detrimental to survival). Another possibility is Miller and Dollard's assumption that any stimulation, if it is strong enough, will produce affective arousal which is necessary for a motivational association. McClelland believes that this is wrong because it is incomplete and does not do justice to the pleasure-seeking activities of the organism, which suggests a third posibility, that moderate increase in stimulus intensity in any sense modality may lead to pleasure and a further increase in pain. While such a notion is intriguing and would explain readily certain drives for activity, for all we know, it there may be other conditions such as hormonal effects on the nervous system which give rise to pleasure and pain.
The persistence of a motive throughout the life history of an individual is a function of a number of variables, among which are the following: a) the absolute frequency of occurrence of the cue-leasure (pain) association: hunger is reliable motive because the association between certain sensations (stomach contractions, sight of food) and eating occurs several times a day throught the lifetime; b) the generality of the association and ease with which it may be extinguished; c) the stress (intensity of pleasure-pain) involved in the association at the time it is formed; d) the age at which the affective association is formed- the earlier it is formed the liklier conditions b and c are to obtain.
Overall, motives are individually acquired but certain situations will produce pleasure or pain with such regularity either through biological or cultural arrangements that the probability of certain common motives developing in all people is very high.Since all motives are learned, is it not likey tht each person will learn a different set? While in gernal this is true, degrees of freedom are in fact considerably reduced in the process of adjustment. Take achievement for example, all cultures must learn to do thing for themselves. In the course of mastery, it is highly likely it will get associated with affective arousal and will produce in time centrally motivating anticipations of success or failure.
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My Dog
Senior Thesis Discussion
Senior Thesis Discussion
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My Dog
1 comment:
Good try, wading through McClelland's prose. One thing to think about is the emphasis here on the relation between emotion (feelings of pain/pleasure) and motivation (the likelihood of engaging in an activity), and the learned nature of all these associations. Academic motivation seems mostly to be thought of in terms of cognition (Bandura is an example of this to some degree), as in the relationship between thinking and doing. But what if academic motivation is as simple as how much pleasure/pain is associated with (experientially) with academic activities? And what about boredom in this paradigm? Most teachers, it seems to me, want their students to ignore the pain (i.e. boredom) and stick with tasks on the basis of promises of future reward (never previously experienced, not reinforced). In the context of a documentary, McClelland might be useful as a background, a bridge between Freud and behaviorism, later taken up by the social learning theorists, i.e. Bandura.
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