MOTIVATION
Motivation
is a theoretical construct used to explain behavior. It represents the reasons
for people's actions, desires, and needs. Motivation can also be defined as
one's direction to behavior, or what causes a person to want to repeat a
behavior and vice versa. A motive is what prompts the person to act in a
certain way, or at least develop an inclination for specific behavior.
According to Maehr and Meyer, "Motivation is a word that is part of the
popular culture as few other psychological concepts are".
Most
motivation theorists assume that motivation is involved in the performance of
all learned responses; that is, a learned behavior will not occur unless it is
energized. The major question among
psychologists, in general, is whether motivation is a primary or secondary
influence on behavior. That is, are
changes in behavior better explained by principles of environmental/ecological
influences, perception, memory, cognitive development, emotion, explanatory
style, or personality or are concepts unique to motivation more pertinent.
For example,
it is known that people respond to increasingly complex or novel events (or
stimuli) in the environment up to a point and then the rate of responding
decreases. This inverted-U-shaped curve
of behavior is well-known and widely acknowledged (e.g., Yerkes & Dodson,
1908). However, the major issue is one
of explaining this phenomenon. Is this a
conditioning (is the individual behaving because of past classical or operant
conditioning), another type of external motivation such as social or
ecological, an internal motivational process (e.g., cognition, emotion, or
self-regulation), or is there some better explanation?
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