Motivation

The subject of motivation deals with the reasons why people act as they do. Some motivation issues that are relevant to political theory include:
 * Economic motivation:
 * What motivates people to work?
 * Why do people consume what they do?
 * What do people really want out of life? (Therefore what should the political system try to provide.)
 * What is the source of peoples' desires? Innate? Or implanted by peers, media, etc.?

The following excerpt is from a marketing text called Research in Consumer Behavior. The authors are commenting on an article published by David Reisman and Howard Roseborough a few years earlier:

Reisman and Roseborough at the Michigan conference [Ann Arbor, 1954, ] presented "a congeries of questions, impressions and more or less educated guesses concerning the Life cycle of consumption in America." The following statements should therefore be placed somewhere between "medium-soft" hypotheses and "medium-hard" facts. Reisman and Roseborough began by contrasting parents and television commercials on one hand with peers and movies on the other as media by which children learn about consumption. They asserted that parents and TV commercials teach children about "the goal directed elements of consumption," that is, the existence and functions of products. Peers and movies teach children about the symbolic values of products, "the expressive elements in consumption, the affective embroidery" of product use. Thus, parents and TV commercials teach children the practical, utilitarian values of cars, foods, beverages, appliances, while peers and movies (in which products serve as props) teach children to expect to possess and to know how to use the "standard package" of consumer goods&mdash;"furniture, radios, television, refrigerator, and the standard brands of food and clothing." Reisman and Roseborough said there is a qualitative difference between the social classes in the acquisition and meaning of the standard package. Before marriage the young working class man has plenty of disposable income. He may "well indulge in tailor-made suits, expensive whiskies, and high-priced restaurants if they also are not high falutin." He is "always more object- than experience oriented, with fun correlated with expenditure of money." This period ends with marriage. The young working class man must then pay for furniture and appliances, a home or an apartment. "Over a period of time he becomes more and more engrossed and expert in the 'consumption' of these hard commodities and the recreation-orientation slowly subsides under the pressure of family obligations and the nagging of his wife." Although the working class man returns to the pursuit of recreation (especially travel and sports) once the most insistent demands of nest-building have been met, as a homeowner he will continually involve himself in do-it-yourself repair of the durable goods in the home For the working class girl, high school graduation is an ominous event. It signals the end of a pleasant round of parties and dates and opens the "unromantic prospect of an early marriage." Work experience, school, and the mass media will have taught her to be experience-oriented, rather than object-oriented in her marriage, while, because of his job, his avocations and his do-it-yourself activities, her husband will always be less interested in experiences and more interested in objects. By contrtast, the middle-managerial groups "take a good deal longer than the working classes to acquire the full domestic package." They are ambivalent about acquiring too many things because they are likely to be moved as the husband progresses in his career. They are reluctant to settle down in a neighborhood which may contain the wrong kind of Joneses as the husband progresses in the company. And they hesitate to buy furnishings which might place them at a status level below that which the husband will eventually reach. While progressing through his career, the middle-management man must keep an eye on the consumption patterns of his peers and his superiors. He must not hurt his chances by failing to keep up with his level in the company, but he must not excel the boss. Since a man's move up is almost always a geographic one, his wife and childrren must also stay ready to make a physical change and a change in life style. They cannot get too attached to their neighborhoods or their schools, and the wife in particular must learn in advance the consumption patterns of the next step up. The physical change is easy because the standard package is so "standard." In every part of the country and in every neighborhood into which the family would be likely to move, most people have most of the same things. The required change in life style is greatly aided, in fact is made possible by what Reisman and Roseborough called "anticipatory socialization." At every age level and every status level the mass media provide a pattern from which the upwardly mobile individual can learn the appropriate manners and mannerisms before the move takes place.  Possible salient points from the p.o.v. of revolutionary theory:
 * Role attributed to movies in shaping behavior
 * Recognition of class division

Gordon Allport (1960): In this country our special field of study has come to be called "behavioral science" (a label now firmly stuck to us with the glue of the Ford millions). The very flavor of this term suggests that we are occupied with semi-closed systems. By his very name the "behavioral scientist" seems committed to study man more in terms of behavior than in terms of experience, more in terms of mathematical space and clock-time than in terms of existential space and time; in terms of response more than in terms of programming; in terms of tension reduction more than tension enhancement; in terms of reaction more than proaction. Now let us leap our cultural stockade for a moment and listen to a bit of ancient Hindu wisdom. Most men, the Hindus say, have four central desires. To some extent, though only roughly, they correspond to the developmental stages of life. The first desire is for pleasure – a condition fully and extensively recognized in our Western theories of tension reduction, reinforcement, libido, and needs. The second desire is for success – likeweise fully recognized and studied in our investigations of power, status, leadership, masculinity, and need-achievement. Now the third desire is to do one's duty and discharge one's responsibility. (It was Bismarck, not a Hindu, who said: "We are not in this world for pleasure but to do our damned duty.") Here our Western work begins to fade out. Excepting for some pale investigations of parental punishment in relation to the development of childhood conscience, we have little to offer on the "duty motive." Conscience we tend to regard as a reactive response to internalized punishment, thus confusing the past "must" of learning with the "ought" involved in programming our future (Allport, 1954, pp. 68-74). Finally, the Hindus tell us that in many people all these three motives pall, and they then seek intensely for a grade of understanding – for a philosophical or religious meaning – that will liberate them from pleasure, success, and duty (Smith, 1958)

Anthony Heath is a rational choice theorist (a subject that includes but is not limited to game theory). Rational choice theory is sometimes seen as having a too narrow model of human motivation, but Heath disputes this. It is one of the paradoxes of exchange theory that we start not with a theory of exchange but with a theory of choice that can be applied much more widely and to many phenomena that do not properly come within our definition of exchange. Thus even altruists whose actions are not 'contingent on rewarding reactions from others' still have to choose between alternative potential beneficiaries, and the theory of choice is in principle as easily applicable to them as it is to the more hard-nosed individuals who engage in social exchange. Altruists, like everybody else, are faced with the problem of 'scarce means which have alternative uses'. They are not exempted from the dilemmas of choice. (Heath, p 7.)

Heath comments on the exchange theorist's 'economic man' and 'rational man' models of human behavior and notes that it is probably an error to regard people's preferences as fixed: 'Economic man' is often misunderstood and wrongly villified, and no doubt the 'rational man' who has walked the previous pages will suffer likewise. True, he cannot be accused (as Homans accused economic man) of being 'anti-social and materialistic, interested only in money and material goods and ready to sacrifice even his old mother to get them (Homans, 1961, p. 79) but perhaps he will be accused instead of being interested only in status and power and willing to sacrifice his principles to get them. Neither accusation would, in fact, be fair, but another, rather more powerful one might be that he is some kind of social innocent, totally oblivious to the successes and failures around him and totally absorbed in his own happiness and disappointment. He is a man quite untouched by envy or jealousy. Like economic man, the rational man with whom we have dealt so far has fixed, unchanging tastes. His happiness (or, more strictly, his utility) depends solely on the actual combination of goods and services that he himself possesses. How he performs relative to others or relative to his past is of no consequence. Not surprisingly, however, a great deal of sociological and psychological research (not to speak of everyday experience) has shown this to be a naive and unrealistic picture of man. Thus it is a commonplace that men's expectations reflect their past experiences. That men have rising expectations is a commonplace of sociology. Once a man has achieved some target on a task he will raise his aspiration level and thus no longer obtain as much satisfaction or utility from his original performance as he did before. (The classic investigation here is Lewin et al., 1944). Again, his satisfaction or utility will not depend simply on the absolute quantity of goods and services that he possesses but on the amount he has relative to that possessed by his 'significant others' or 'comparative reference group'. Indeed, it is one of the central tenets of sociology, and one of the principal features that distinguish it from economics, that men compare themselves with others (the classic statements here being Stouffer et al., 1949, and Merton, 1957).