Personality and Motivation

Abstract

PERSONALITY, as the term is commonly used by American researchers, refers to the motives, attitudes, traits, habits, mechanisms of defense and adjustment, appetites, and aversions that combine to determine a person's molar behavior. Since these characteristics of the person are, in turn, largely determined by his experience, any account of their origin must refer to (a) the learning process, (b) motivation, and (c) the environmental conditions under which motivated action, and the consequent learning, occurs. Until adequate theories of learning and motivation were available, and until usable technics were developed for measuring children's motivation and the environmental conditions of learning, personality analysis was bound to be a somewhat hit-or-miss procedure. Over the past dozen years, however, Hull (16) and his colleagues have developed a comprehensive theory of adaptive learning that appears to be unusually useful for the understanding of the details of personality development. The necessary step of applying Hull's rather abstract principles to the molar behavior of social human beings was taken by Miller and Dollard (21) in Social Learning and Imitation. The first five chapters of this book presented an admirably clear statement of the theory of adaptive learning. On the motivational side, two developments are worthy of emphasis. Altho Freud had made some attempt to derive complex adult motives from the simpler libidinal urges, the lack of either a learning theory or satisfactory empirical data had stultified the effort (cf. the concept of sublimation). Shaffer's (28) analysis, based primarily on theoretical premises, has received essential confirmation from recent animal research, and has been largely incorporated in the broader learning theory described by Miller and Dollard. From the standpoint of theory, therefore, both learning and motivation have passed beyond the stage of speculation, and the contemporary researcher on personality development has effective frameworks within which he can work.