Human beings are purposive creatures, who set aims for themselves and strive to fulfill them. The desire for certain outcomes is incorporated into our personalities. Each of us has a variety of personal goals, which can be arranged in a hierarchy according to their importance. Each may in certain circumstances become an active desire. Under normal conditions, in psychologically well-functioning people, personal goals are the most important sources of motivation.
Our biological needs, which include hunger, thirst, freedom from pain, survival, are another important type of motivation. When they are regularly satisfied, these needs are apparent only in the modulated form of personal goals. (A gourmet, for example, seeks food for pleasure, not survival). Deprivation makes biological needs a strong motive. Prior deprivation causes some people to be strongly motivated by the psychological presence of biological needs, even when they are currently fulfilled.
Goals involve a desire for outcomes; biological needs push for satisfaction. When important goals are persistently frustrated, they may come to resemble needs and exert a push for satisfaction. While personal goals can be internally activated, by thoughts and images, frequently conditions in the environment elicit or activate them: a task activates the goal to achieve; another’s need activates the goal to benefit people. In contrast, needs tend to press for satisfaction even in the absence of relevant environmental conditions.
Social customs, rules, and standards also give rise to action or determine its direction and aim. Many customs and rules are second nature to us, we “automatically” follow them, without awareness. They may even define for us when to become angry and how to express our anger. They define our modes of interaction with others, including the respect (or lack of respect) we show to people who fill certain positions in society. When a custom or rule is strongly established, people will deviate from it only when another strong motivation requires deviation. Often we become aware of the influence of rules and customs only when there are compelling reasons to deviate from them. Whether we follow them automatically or consciously, adherence usually gives rise to good feelings and deviation to guilt, anxiety, or the fear of disapproval and punishment. This is especially true of norms that identify mutual social obligations.
Finally, unconscious motivation can guide the choice of our aims. In this case, we do not know why we choose the aim, and sometimes do not know the real aim. A motivation to fail may result from unconscious hostility to parents. Anger may be displaced from parents or people in authority to more acceptable objects.
All of us have certain motives: protection of our physical self from danger, attack, and deprivation; protection and enhancement of our self-image or self-concept and the associated values and ways of life. In people (or groups) whose self-concept is poor, negative, or under attack, the desire to protect the self-image will become a highly important motive; it may come to resemble a need pushing for satisfaction.
How do people select aims to act on?9 Their personal goals and other motives form a hierarchy. The aims of individuals or groups at a particular time depend on the relative importance of their motives and the degree to which circumstances allow or call for the expression and fulfillment of each motive. Persistent life problems “activate” motives for self-protection, make them dominant, and over time needlike. Ordinary self-related goals, such as the desire for satisfying work or friendship, are replaced by self-protective goals, the desire to defend the physical or psychological self; other-related goals, the desire to benefit people or fulfill moral values, are less likely to become active.
Other-related goals arise from personal values; they resemble personal goals, except that their desired outcome is human welfare. At least two kinds of personal values are important. A prosocial value orientation involves concern about others and the desire to benefit them. Research shows that people with a stronger prosocial orientation give more help to others in need. A moral rule orientation embodies the desire to maintain or fulfill moral principles, norms, and rules.10 When other-related goals are low in the hierarchy of motives, the environmental press must be greater if they are to become active; for example, the other person’s distress must be more intense.
Under persistently difficult life conditions, lasting changes often occur in motive hierarchies. Self-protective and self-related goals become more important, and people become less open to others’ need.
People judge others’ need for help relative to their own well-being. They engage in hedonic balancing; they compare their “relative wellbeing,” the discrepancy between their current welfare and their normal or usual well-being, with others’ relative well-being, the discrepancy between others’ current welfare and what they regard as others’ normal, or usual, or customary well-being.11 If their own relative well-being is worse, people are unlikely to help, even if they are in an absolute sense better off than a person in need. Even apart from comparisons, when people’s own well-being is low, the need of others has to be great to gain their attention. The main exceptions are people with strong prosocial or moral values.
The defense of the physical and psychological self are basic goals, but they can be dormant for a person with a strong feeling of personal adequacy who lives under normal (nonthreatening) conditions. People with a weaker sense of their physical safety or weak self-esteem are easily threatened. Those with less faith in their own efficacy and less expectation of fulfilling their goals are easily frustrated. But even people with a strong individual or collective sense of physical and psychological safety will feel threatened when they face intense and persistent difficulties in life, and their primary motive can become defense of the individual or collective self.
Motivations for aggression: psychological states and processes that promote aggression
A variety of motives result from threat, attack, the perception of danger, and interference with the fulfillment of goals. Self-protective personal goals can become so intense that they develop the imperative, forceful quality
