Account Of Motivation Research Articles

Emotional reactions to deviance in groups: the relation between number of angry reactions, felt rejection, and conformity.

How many members of a group need to express their anger in order to influence a deviant group member’s behavior? In two studies, we examine whether an increase in number of angry group members affects the extent to which a deviant individual feels rejected, and we investigate downstream effects on conformity. We show that each additional angry reaction linearly increases the extent to which a deviant individual feels rejected, and that this relation is independent of the total number of majority members (Study 1). This felt rejection is then shown to lead to anti-conformity unless two conditions are met: (1) the deviant is motivated to seek reacceptance in the group, and (2) conformity is instrumental in gaining reacceptance because it is observable by the majority (Study 2). These findings show that angry reactions are likely to trigger anti-conformity in a deviant, but they are also consistent with a motivational account of conformity, in which conformity is strategic behavior aimed at gaining reacceptance from the group.

Understanding a Desireless Action as a Benevolent Action

Scholars have questioned the doctrine of desireless action in the Bhagavadgita and questioned whether Krishna’s advice is to be taken literally on the basis that the Humean account of motivation is more plausible (or not) than the anti-Humean account. In this paper, I will avoid the Humean principle debate by proposing a new way of examining the term ‘desireless action’. I aim to show that Krishna’s advice can be rendered coherent on the basis that we understand a desireless action as an action motivated by a benevolent desire. I will be referring to the notion of benevolence as constructed by Francis Hutcheson because there is a parallel between the Hutchesonian experience of benevolence and purusha, or pure consciousness. Benevolent desire results in a desireless action since to act benevolently is to act ‘disinterestedly’ and thereby accepting purusha as one’s true nature.

Responses compete and collaborate, shaping each others' distributions: Commentary on Boakes, Patterson, Kendig, and Harris (2015).

Boakes, Patterson, Kendig, and Harris (2015) showed that schedule-induced drinking (SID), typically concentrated in the first half of the interpellet interval, is not moved there exclusively by competition from magazine entries, and that not all arbitrary responses can be maintained by adventitious reinforcement. They attribute such inferences to Killeen and Pellón (2013) and Patterson and Boakes (2012), and on that basis reject their explanation for the excessive nature of many adjunctive responses as a result of reinforcement. It is a mistaken attribution, as Killeen and Pellón emphasized that reinforcers act on many competing interim and terminal responses. That attribution is a minor oversight on the authors' part; their return to a discredited motivational account is, however, a major blunder. It discards the seminal recent advances in understanding the nature of schedule-induced responses (e.g., those of Patterson and Boakes), and even the positive contributions of their own article: Their data show very strong correlations between magazine entries and drinking, providing much more evidence for response competition than their microanalysis provides against it.

Efficacy, Beliefs, and Investment in Step-Level Public Goods

A central concept for understanding social dilemma behavior is the efficacy of an actor's cooperative behavior in terms of increasing group well-being. We report a decision and game theoretical analysis of efficacy in step-level public goods (SPGs). Previous research shows a positive relation between efficacy and contributions to SPGs and explains this relation by a purely motivational account. We show, however, that from a decision and game theory perspective an increasing relationship is not general, but only follows from very specific assumptions about players’ information and beliefs. We offer 3 examples of how the predicted efficacy–contribution relation depends on players’ information and beliefs. We discuss the implications of our results for the social psychology of efficacy in social dilemmas.

Mill’s Progressive Principles by David O. Brink (review)

Reviewed by: Mill’s Progressive Principles by David O. Brink Andrew J. Pyle David O. Brink. Mill’s Progressive Principles. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Pp. xx + 307. Cloth, $55.00. “I regard utility as the ultimate appeal on all ethical questions; but it must be utility in the largest sense, grounded on the permanent interests of man as a progressive being.” This volume, described by the author as a “progress report” on his twenty five years of thinking about Mill’s moral and political philosophy, takes the form of an extended commentary on this famous passage from On Liberty, which Brink clearly—and rightly—regards as providing the key to much that is otherwise puzzling in Mill’s writings. The notion of men and women as “progressive beings” informs Mill’s moral and political philosophy in many respects, and provides him with at least the beginnings of defensible replies to the standard objections levelled against him. These objections concern his distinction between higher and lower pleasures, his putative proof of the principle of utility, and the compatibility of his liberal politics with his utilitarian ethics. Critics have argued that the higher/lower pleasures distinction is incompatible with hedonism; that the alleged proof of utilitarianism commits two first-year logic howlers in quick succession; and that utilitarian ethical principles can be used to support paternalist authoritarianism. Brink clearly regards these common objections as based on misunderstandings, and provides us with an account of how Mill could have responded to them. Regarding higher and lower pleasures, Mill can be read as departing from classical hedonism, which conceives pleasures as subjective states. In opposition to this we have the objective conception of pleasures as activities of certain kinds, notably exercises of our powers. If we align ourselves with Aristotle against Epicurus and Bentham, and think of pleasures as objective, we can think of the autonomous exercise of our rational natures as in part constitutive of our higher pleasures. This makes sense of “better Socrates dissatisfied,” and gives Mill a principled reply to the objection that utilitarian ethics can support authoritarian governments. Even if the authoritarian regime can amply provide the lower pleasures in the form of bread and circuses, it is only a liberal government that actively encourages its citizens to participate in public debate. As for the supposed howlers of the supposed proof of utilitarianism, Brink offers us an alternative reading which starts with the assumption that morality involves an impartial point of view, and then offers us the utilitarian formula as the best way of understanding this impartiality. The work is an admirable example of the analytical approach to the history of philosophy, but might have benefitted, philosophically, from a little closer attention to context. Chapter 2 discusses “Varieties of Motivation,” and the problems faced by utilitarians in reconciling their account of human motivation with their moral theory. Are humans narrowly egoistic? If so, politics reduces to social engineering. Or are we capable of a wider and more generous egoism, coming to take pleasure in the pleasures of others, in which case the problem is one of education and culture? Or are humans capable of fully altruistic action? Rousseau falls here into his notorious chicken-and-egg problem: only the right sort of individuals can establish the democratic state, but it takes a properly democratic state [End Page 853] to educate men and women in the virtues of citizenship. Bentham accepts the Hobbesian picture of individuals driven inevitably by their own pleasures and pains, and reduces politics to social engineering. Godwin argues that human perfectibility will lead us in the end to love everyone’s pleasure indifferently and impartially. Mill’s vacillation and uncertainty on this point is perfectly principled. He tells us clearly in Book 5 of the Logic that ethology, the science of the development of character, is as yet in its infancy. We simply do not know whether the best way of promoting the general good is by means of external sanctions, Rousseau-style emotional education in fraternity, or philosophical arguments in favor of an impersonal love of the good as such, without distinction of mine and thine. Another point at which closer attention to context might...

Understanding the Terrorist Threat

Terrorism is a tool designed to reach political objectives. Terrorism emerges in a social and political context, representing a form of psychological warfare aimed at achieving political goals by eliciting an emotional response in the populace of a perceived adversary. As such, terrorism requires both the ability to penetrate the enemy’s defenses and the motivation to justify violence. This article presents a means-end motivational account of terrorism, reviewing (a) the scope of the terrorist threat, (b) what drives perceiving terrorism as an instrumental means of reaching political goals, (c) how the quest for personal significance motivates adopting terrorism-justifying ideologies, and (d) how this understanding of terrorism may inform counter-terrorism policy considerations.

Leibniz's Twofold Gap Between Moral Knowledge and Motivation

Moral rationalists and sentimentalists traditionally disagree on at least two counts, namely regarding the source of moral knowledge or moral judgements and regarding the source of moral motivation. I will argue that even though Leibniz's moral epistemology is very much in line with that of mainstream moral rationalists, his account of moral motivation is better characterized as sentimentalist. Just like Hume, Leibniz denies that there is a necessary connection between knowing that something is right and the motivation to act accordingly. Instead, he believes that certain affections are necessary for moral motivation. On my interpretation, then, Leibniz is an externalist about judgements and motivation: he is committed to a gap between the judgement that something is morally right and the motivation to act accordingly. As a matter of fact, I will argue that there are two gaps. The first and less controversial one has to do with the fact that Leibniz reconciles his psychological egoism with ethical altruism through his account of love. The second gap between moral judgements and motivation is a more fundamental one: Leibniz denies that there are any necessary connections between beliefs and motivation, or even more generally, between perceptions and appetitions.

Handedness predicts motivation to switch from the status quo

Degree of handedness is a correlate of structural brain asymmetries and predicts individual differences in episodic memory, belief updating and various biases in decision-making. We examined whether handedness moderated the status quo bias given previous research suggests that both constructs are related to loss aversion. Participants answered hypothetical scenarios in which they decided either to stay with the status quo or to switch. Results indicated that consistent and inconsistent right-handers both exhibited status quo bias (Experiment 1; N = 180), but inconsistent right-handers were more (or less) likely to stick with the status quo when informed of a positive (or negative) past experience. When provided with more equivocal information about the quality of the status quo and alternative, consistent-handers (CH) were more likely to show a status quo bias (Experiment 2; N = 222). Compared to CH, we argue that inconsistent-handers (IH) more readily update their beliefs in a manner consistent with how the status quo and alternative options are presented—switching when finding a reason to favour the alternative and staying when the status quo is described more favourably. These handedness differences fit a motivational account explaining status quo bias rather than a loss aversion account.

Aristotle’s Conception of Practical Truth

Aristotle’s notion of practical truth is fundamentally important to both the rationality and the practicality of practical reasoning. But what is practical truth? I argue for an original interpretation according to which practical truth is the truth about what is unqualifiedly good for a particular person when all of her particular circumstances are taken into account. In contrast to other current interpretations, this one allows practical truth to fall within Aristotle’s standard account of truth, and it explains the sense in which practical truth is nonetheless distinctly practical, using Aristotle’s so-called Guise of the Good account of motivation.

Thomas Aquinas, Josef Seifert, and the Metaphysics of Respecting Persons

I. Introduction Jacques Maritain once quipped that can be more remote from the facts than the belief that 'personalism' is one school or doctrine, as some philosophies have nothing more in common than the term 'person.' (1) Nevertheless, there are at least several distinguishing features of any genuinely philosophy: a belief in the unbridgeable divide between persons and nonpersons, and in the inalienable dignity of the former; an emphasis on a person's incommunicability or uniqueness; a defense of the personalist norm, which states that persons ought to be affirmed for their own sake (or ought never to be treated merely as means to an end); and, finally, the rejection of any political system that subordinates a to the social whole or, conversely, that marginalizes a person's obligations toward the common good. (2) If these are accurate standards for identifying a system or thinker, then Thomas Aquinas appears to be a paradigmatic personalist, at least at first glance. He certainly thinks that the difference between persons and nonpersons is a difference in kind, not degree. (3) He also defends the inherent dignity of persons by arguing that the term person refers to is most perfect in all of nature. (4) Further, he thinks that a is incommunicable or radically unique because she is individuated in part through her freely performed actions. (5) With respect to how we ought to treat persons, he says that a ought to be loved with the love of friendship, which involves willing the good of a for that person's own sake. (6) And, finally, Aquinas states that a human person, as a member of the species Homo sapiens, must at times subordinate her good for the sake of the common good; however, this does not make her a mere part within a whole, because she is willed by God for her own sake (or as an end in herself). (7) True, Aquinas does not give us a systematic or complete personalism, but (according to the above criteria) he certainly seems to be a thinker. Karol Wojtyia goes so far as to argue that a broadly Thomistic anthropology and ethics are necessary for grounding an adequate personalism. And he makes this argument despite criticizing Aquinas for failing to explore personal subjectivity and lived experience. In sum, Wojtyia focuses on what he takes to be missing in Aquinas's account of the person, but he affirms and defends its underlying metaphysical principles. (8) Josef Seifert, however, offers a different kind of critique in his Personalism and Personalisms, one that questions the suitability of Aquinas's principles for grounding an adequate personalism. His central argument is that Aquinas's account of the good is incompatible with the respect owed to persons--because Aquinas thinks that something is good only in relation to an appetite, a can be good for another, but not in himself. In what follows, I argue that Seifert's critique fails because he misreads Aquinas's metaethical claims. In particular, he fails to appreciate Aquinas's understanding of the ecstatic (or other-directed) nature of being and goodness. If my interpretation of Aquinas is correct, then his metaphysical principles can ground the proper respect owed to persons. They are, in fact, ideal for doing so. I conclude by suggesting that Seifert's own account of the good needlessly creates a divide between a and his desires, and thereby creates problems for his account of moral motivation. II. Seifert on Aquinas as a Personalist Thinker Seifert does acknowledge that personalism owes a genuine debt to Aquinas: St. Thomas is in a great many respects not only a thinker, but even a true model of a metaphysician. (9) As I noted earlier, however, he thinks that Aquinas's understanding of goodness precludes the possibility of affirming a for her own sake, which is the only appropriate response to the dignity of personhood. …

Recognition and Approach Responses Toward Threatening Objects

Previous research suggests that positive stimuli are often approached as well as recognized faster than negative stimuli. We argue that this effect does not hold if negative stimuli are associated with threat. Based on fear module theory ( Öhman & Mineka, 2001 , 2003 ), we argue that individuals recognize threatening stimuli faster than positive stimuli because of a constant monitoring of the environment for threatening objects. Moreover, based on the assumption of a motivational account underlying approach-avoidance responses ( Krieglmeyer & Deutsch, 2010 ), we assume the recognition then directly evokes a careful and slow approach of threatening objects. Applying a response time task that measures approach movement and recognition times within the same task, we found that individuals recognize threatening pictures faster than positive pictures, but approach the threatening pictures slower than the positive pictures.

Power, Gender, and The Politics of Our Selves

Amy Allen’s insightful and nuanced feminist critical-theoretical account of the politics of our selves could be strengthened with a more complex and differentiated account of power and of gender, and of the social as a site of multiple conflicting and contesting relations. Such an account would adhere more consistently to Allen’s own project of understanding subjects to be constituted through both relations of power and relations of interdependence and mutuality, care and solidarity. The development of this account, and of a situated account of desire or motivation, is essential for a feminist critical theory of self and social transformation.

The role of reward prediction in the control of attention.

Previously rewarded stimuli involuntarily capture attention. The learning mechanisms underlying this value-driven attentional capture remain less understood. We tested whether theories of prediction-based associative reward learning explain the conditions under which reward feedback leads to value-based modulations of attentional priority. Across 4 experiments, we manipulated whether stimulus features served as unique predictors of reward outcomes. Participants received monetary rewards for correctly identifying a color-defined target in an initial search task (training phase) and then immediately completed a second, unrewarded visual search task in which color was irrelevant (test phase). In Experiments 1-3, monetary reward followed correct target selection during training, but critically, no target-defining features carried uniquely predictive information about reward outcomes. Under these conditions, we found no evidence of attentional capture by the previous target colors in the subsequent test phase. Conversely, when target colors in the training phase of Experiment 4 carried uniquely predictive information about reward magnitude, we observed significant attentional capture by the previously rewarded color. Our findings show that value-based attentional priority only develops for stimulus features that carry uniquely predictive information about reward, ruling out a purely motivational account and suggesting that mechanisms of reward prediction play an important role in shaping attentional priorities.

Are individual differences in appetitive and defensive motivation related? A psychophysiological examination in two samples

Appetitive and defensive motivation account for a good deal of variance in personality and mental health, but whether individual differences in these systems are correlated or orthogonal has not been conclusively established. Previous investigations have generally relied on self-report and have yielded conflicting results. We therefore assessed the relation between psychophysiological indices of appetitive and defensive motivation during elicitation of these motivational states: specifically, frontal electroencephalogram asymmetry during reward anticipation and startle response during anticipation of predictable or unpredictable threat of shock. Results in a sample of psychopathology-free community members (n=63), an independent sample of undergraduates with a range of internalising symptoms (n=64), and the combination of these samples (n=127) revealed that differences in responding to the two tasks were not significantly correlated. Average coefficients approached zero in all three samples (community: .04, undergraduate: −.01, combined: .06). Implications of these findings for research on normal and abnormal personality are discussed.

Aid Transparency and Accountability: ‘Build It and They'll Come’?1

Concerns about the transparency of aid have become more prominent against a recent backdrop of donor commitments to increase aid effectiveness. Innovative approaches to providing more and better information about aid have been developed. This article explores the contemporary focus on aid transparency in the context of longer‐standing concerns over accountable aid. It finds that the links between inputs, outputs and impacts in aid transparency and accountability initiatives are often not articulated or well understood, and that the link between aid transparency and accountable aid is barely addressed. Future attempts to develop effective aid TAIs need to take full account of the diverse motivations, approaches and actors involved in their – often implicit – theories of change, in particular, the citizens of aid‐recipient countries.

The macroeconomic effects of legislated tax changes in Germany

This paper studies the short-term macroeconomic effects of legislated tax changes in Germany using a five-variable vector autoregression (VAR) framework. Identification of the tax shock follows a recently proposed narrative approach. Based on a historical account of German tax legislation, the timing, size, and motivation of legislated tax changes are assessed and a time series of exogenous tax shocks is constructed. The VAR results indicate a substantial and statistically significant reaction of output following implementation of a tax change. In response to a one percentage point increase in the tax-to-GDP ratio, we observe a maximum output reduction of 2.4%. These results suggest that previous estimates of the effects of tax changes on output in Germany are downward biased.

Jack Michael’s Motivation

Among many of Jack Michael's contributions to the field of behavior analysis is his behavioral account of motivation. This paper focuses on the concept of motivating operation (MO) by outlining its development from Skinner's (1938) notion of drive. Conceptually, Michael's term helped us change our focus on how to study motivation by shifting its origins from the organism to the environment. Michael's account also served to stimulate applied research and to better understand behavioral function in clinical practice.

MOTIVATIONAL ORIENTATIONS IN PHYSICS LEARNING: A SELF-DETERMINATION THEORY APPROACH

The first objective of the present study was to test the factorial validity of the inventory designed to measure students’ motivation to study physics in school. Based on self-determination theory (SDT), it was hypothesised that the four factors of External Regulation, Introjected Regulation, Identified Regulation and Intrinsic Motivation account for the covariances among the items of the inventory. It was also expected that gender moderates the factorial validity of the inventory. A sample of 3626 Finnish comprehensive school students was used. A multilevel confirmatory factor analysis (MLCFA) was used to investigate the fit of the hypothesised four-factor model. The second objective of the present study was to investigate different educational correlates of the four motivation factors. Girls had a statistically higher mean score than did boys for all four factors. Otherwise only minor gender differences were found. Implications for physics teaching are discussed. Key words: motivational orientations, multilevel confirmatory factor analysis, science learning, self-determination theory.

Linking moral emotion attributions with behavior: Why “(un)happy victimizers” and “(un)happy moralists” act the way they feel

This article addresses the question of why the emotions children and adolescents anticipate in the context of hypothetical scenarios have been repeatedly found to predict actual (im)moral behavior. It argues that a common motivational account of this relationship is insufficient. Instead, three links are proposed that connect cognitive representations of emotional experiences related to future (im)moral actions with decision making and action. Accordingly, it is argued that moral emotion attributions can represent a dominant desire (link 1), outcome expectancies (link 2), or an emotional response to anticipated (in)consistencies of the self (link 3). These three links exemplify different forms of moral agency that emerge in the course of children's and adolescents' development.

Toward a Biological Understanding of Mortality Salience (And Other Threat Compensation Processes)

Terror management theorists have proposed explanations of why death anxiety has a special status beyond other anxieties and furthermore argue that awareness of death elicits a defense mechanism that is qualitatively different from other sorts of threat-defense mechanisms. Our review suggests that the biological mechanisms through which thoughts of mortality motivate defensive behavior are not unique. Rather, we propose that an evolutionarily primitive, biologically based anxiety system underlies mortality salience (MS) effects. Death anxiety may well be a mainspring of human activity, yet we suggest that a fundamental set of biological responses to uncertainty—and the processes associated with them—lie at the root of MS defenses. Our proposed motivational account of mortality salience provides a biologically informed, mechanistic elucidation of threat-compensation processes that may be applied to a wide range of social psychological phenomena.