Human Motivation

• SpiritWiki
• Eupsychia
• LPHDF
  • LP HEALING Framework
  • LP Creative Framework
  • LP Connection Framework
  • LP Educational Framework
  • LP Psychological Framework
    • Consciousness
    • Connection Capacity
    • Connection-Centered Psychology
  • LP Metaphysical Framework
• PEM
  • Pathfinder Pedagogical Framework
    • The Four-Point Foundation
    • The Seven Pillars
    • Pathfinder Root Structure
      • Mind-Body Connection
      • Spirit-Mind Connection
  • Pathfinder Pedagogical Foundations
    • Trauma-Informed Education
    • Life-Centered Education
    • Healing and Connection-Centered
    • Minimally Invasive Education
    • Needs-Satisfying Education
    • Relational Education
      • Dialogic Method
      • Praxis
    • Post-Capitalist Skills
  • Pathfinder Delivery Framework
    • Learning Hub
    • Learning Pod
    • Healing Space
    • Connection Space
    • Learning Series
  • Pathfinder Institute
  • Pathfinder Curriculum
  • Pathfinder AI
    • AI In Education
    • Pathfinder Medium Account
• Avatar.GLOBAL
  • Evolutionary Theory
  • Critical Theory
    • Narrative
      • Creation Template
      • Master Narrative
    • Praxis
• Support

Human Motivation

According to Abraham Maslow's 1943 Theory of Human Motivation, humans are motivated by a set of biologically rooted needs that they are driven to fulfill. Fulfilling these needs creates healthy, happy, fully realized human beings. Thwarting these needs creates miserable, diminished, neurotic and psychotic human being.

Concept Map

Key Terms

Eupsychia > Eupsychian Theory >

• Human Development
• Human Motivation
• Human Nature
• Human Pathology
• Human Potential

Eupsychian Theory

• Human Development
• Human Motivation
• Human Nature
• Human Pathology
• Human Potential

Human Motivation >

• D-Realm
• B-Realm

Related LP Terms

Human Motivation > Ego Mode

Non-LP Related Terms

Human Motivation >

Notes

In his 1943 article "Preface to Motivation Theory," Maslow rested his theory of motivation on the following thirteen propositions. Note that Maslow distinguished between "behaviour theory" and "motivation theory." "Behavior is determined by several classes of determinants, of which motivation is one..."

1. Motivation is a property of the person, not a body part or isolated subsystem. When someone is hungry (or afraid, or lonely), that state alters perception, memory, emotion, thinking, and behaviour broadly—not just “stomach activity.” A motivation theory that treats drives as separable pieces will miss how changes ripple through the whole organism. John Smith is hungry, not John Smith's stomach—the entire individual is motivated, not merely a part. When hungry, a person changes holistically: perceptions shift to notice food more readily, memories favour past meals, emotions become tense, and thoughts focus on obtaining sustenance rather than abstract problems. Satisfaction likewise comes to the whole person, making reductionist approaches that isolate bodily functions theoretically and experimentally unsound.
2. Don’t use hunger as the paradigm for all motivation. Hunger looks “simple” because it has a clearer somatic base and is easier to isolate experimentally, but that makes it a misleading model for typical human motives. Most everyday motivations (status, belonging, approval, money, love) are less localizable and more entangled with personality and culture. Maslow argues we learn more about general motivation by studying complex motives like love than by treating hunger as the master template. We should not take a localizable, somatic, partial drive as paradigm for motivation theory. Hunger is a poor model because it's unusually isolated, less common than other motivations, and has a known somatic base—features atypical of most human desires. Better paradigms would be the desire for money or especially love, which clearly demonstrate that most drives cannot be separated from the whole organism or localized to specific bodily systems or even limited to a single base need. Using hunger as the standard case leads to trivial, invalid experiments rather than tackling the difficult but important problems of holistic motivation.
3. Conscious desires are usually means, not ultimate ends (and unconscious motivation matters). Many surface wants (money, cars, clothes) function as instruments for deeper aims (security, safety, respect, love, self-worth, truth). Because those deeper aims often aren’t fully conscious, motivation theory must address unconscious goals and not just what people report at face value. In practice, this pushes theory toward interpreting “what a desire is for,” not merely cataloguing the desire. The study of motivation should stress ultimate rather than partial goals—ends rather than means to ends. Through deeper analysis, these surface desires inevitably lead to fundamental needs that require no further justification, such as love, safety, or self-esteem. Therefore motivation theory must focus on these ultimate, largely unconscious goals rather than merely cataloguing conscious wishes.

   We  want money  so  that  we  may have an automobile. In tum we  want an automobile because the neighbors have one and we wish not to feel inferior to them so that we can retain our own self-respect and so that we can be loved and respected by others.

4. Fundamental goals are more universal than the culturally shaped paths used to reach them. Different societies can channel the same underlying need (e.g., esteem) into very different visible behaviours (hunter, warrior, healer, ascetic). So if you classify motivation only by overt acts, you’ll mistakenly treat culturally different “routes” as different motives. Maslow’s point is that universality is more likely at the level of deep goals than at the level of specific, local desires. Also, not only conscious but also unconscious motivations must be accounted for in a theory of motivation. Since fundamental goals rarely appear directly in consciousness, sound theory cannot neglect unconscious processes that may be even more important than conscious content. Psychoanalysis demonstrates that the relationship between conscious desires and unconscious aims can be indirect or even negative, as in reaction formations where the surface desire masks its opposite. Exclusive study of conscious motivation leaves out crucial determinants of behaviour and results in incomplete, misleading theory. This one is rather important because it provides a base for unifying humanity despite widespread cultural difference! As Maslow said "...There is now sufficient anthropological evidence to indicate that the fundamental or ultimate desires of all human beings do not differ nearly as much as do their conscious everyday desires." In other words, deep down we are all more alike than different. Further

   It may then be that, if we  think of ultimates, the one individual's desire to  be a good hunter has the same dynamics and the same fundamental  aim  as  the desire  of  the other individual to be a good medicine man.  We may then assert that it would  be  more  useful for psychologists to combine these two seemingly disparate conscious  desires  into the  same category rather than to put them into different categories on purely behavioral grounds.  Apparently ends- in-themselves  are  far  more  universal  than  the roads taken to achieve those ends, for these roads are determined locally in the specific culture.

5. A single behavior/desire can express multiple motives at once. Acts (including sexual behaviour, symptom formation, achievement striving) are often “channels” through which several needs flow simultaneously. What looks like one motive on the surface may serve safety, esteem, closeness, revenge, belonging, or multiple aims together. That’s why purely behavioral classification tends to oversimplify and misread meaning. Maslow emphasizes that it is "unusual,  not usual that an act or a conscious wish has but one motivation." Sexual behavior, for instance, might simultaneously serve needs for masculinity assurance, closeness, safety, love, or prestige, though consciously experienced as simply sexual. Similarly, a hysterically paralyzed arm may fulfill multiple opposing wishes for revenge, pity, love, and respect all at once. Acts typically have plural motivations, and taking them at face value arbitrarily excludes the possibility of total understanding
6. Motivation is constant and woven into nearly every organismic state. Maslow argues motivation is not a rare “special state” that switches on occasionally; it’s continuous, fluctuating, and complex. Even states like feeling rejected are inherently motivating because they generate cascades of striving, defense, hostility, and repair attempts. A sound theory treats “what is happening in the organism” as inherently directional and goal-linked. A static statement like "this person feels rejected" only begins the analysis—a dynamic psychology must add countless statements about the motivational consequences that automatically follow: tension, unhappiness, compulsive desires to regain affection, defensive efforts, hostility accumulation. The feeling itself generates new motivational processes, making motivation constant, fluctuating, and complex rather than a special, qualitatively distinct state. Every organismic condition, both somatic and psychic, carries motivational implications.
7. Humans are perpetually wanting; needs interact and tend to form a hierarchy of prepotency. Satisfaction is usually partial and temporary; when one desire is met, another comes forward. Importantly, which need appears depends on what’s already (relatively) satisfied or what is in the process of being thwarted. —creative or “higher” strivings presuppose some baseline of safety, belonging, etc. The appearance of a need rests on prior situations and other prepotent needs. As one desire is satisfied, another pops up to take its place in an endless sequence throughout life. Wants arrange themselves in shifting hierarchies of prepotency (consider Maslow's nested boxes metaphor here), and higher-level desires (for music, mathematics, home decoration) only emerge when more fundamental needs have attained relative satisfaction, not because the need is not active, but because the energy will not be there for its satisfaction. You can't learn to play an instrument when your entire week taken up with work. You can't make your house look pretty if you're too poor to buy pretty things. This hierarchical arrangement and constant emergence of new desires makes atomistic study of isolated motivational units theoretically inadequate.

   We should never have the desire to compose music or create mathematical systems, or to adorn our homes, or to be well dressed if our stomachs were empty most of  the time, or if  we were continually dying of thirst, or if we were continually threatened by an always impending catastrophe,  or if  everyone hated us.

8. Reject atomistic “lists of drives”; motivation is hierarchical and depends on level of analysis. Drive lists wrongly imply equal strength, independence, and clean separability among motives. Such listings imply equal potency and probability of appearance among drives, which is incorrect since emergence depends on satisfaction of more prepotent desires. They also falsely suggest drives are isolated from one another when they actually overlap extensively, and they mix different levels of specificity indiscriminately—like combining broad needs with specific protein cravings. Drives don't form an arithmetic sum but exist in nested hierarchies where the number identified depends entirely on the degree of analytical magnification. Maslow argues motives nest inside broader categories (like boxes within boxes), so the number of “drives” you list depends on your magnification level (very general vs very specific). Proper theory distinguishes levels and treats fundamental goals as abstract categories, not a flat catalog.

   Thus we  can speak of a need for gratification or equilibrium;  or more  specifically of a need to eat; or still more specifically of a need to fill the stomach; or still more specifically of  a desire for  proteins, or still more specifically of a desire for  a particular protein; and so  on.  Too many of  the listings that we now have available have combined indiscriminately needs at various levels  of  magnification.  With such a  confusion it is understandable that some lists should contain three or four needs and others contain hundreds of needs.  If we wished, we could have such a list of drives contain anywhere from one to one mil- lion drives, depending entirely on the specificity of analysis.  Furthermore, it should be clearly under- stood  that if we  attempt to  discuss  the fundamental desires  they should be  clearly understood as  sets  of  desires,  as fundamental  categories or collections  of  desires.  In other words,  such  an enumeration  of  fundamental  goals  would  be  an abstract classification  rather than a  cataloguing list.

9. Classify motivation by fundamental goals (“pulls”), not instigating drives (“pushes”). Because behaviour, conscious desire, and even the apparent goal object can each be misleading (food-seeking might be safety-seeking; sex-seeking might be esteem-seeking), they are weak foundations for classification. Maslow’s “logical exclusion” move leaves fundamental—often unconscious—goals as the most stable basis for theory. This is a central methodological claim: organize motivation theory around ends, not surface triggers.

     It is  only the fundamental goal that remains constant through all the fluctuations  and  interchangeability  of  meanings that a dynamic approach forces upon psychological theorizing....   A human being having a  desire  for  food,  then be-having in  the proper fashion  to  get it and then chewing and eating it may actually be seeking for safety rather than for food.  

10. Motivation theory must be anthropocentric, not animal centric. Animal studies can help, but human motivation differs crucially because instincts fade up the phylogenetic scale and culture/learning take over. Instincts steadily disappear and are replaced by conglomerations of hereditary reflexes, drives, and extensive cultural learning. Most important, as we go up the phylogenetic scale and as the instincts drop away there is more and more dependence upon the culture as an adaptive tool. Animal data can be useful only when used cautiously and analogously; monkeys are preferable to rats because human beings resemble them more closely. The exclusive reliance on animal experimentation has produced concepts (like "drive") that emerge from preoccupation with physiological needs and may not apply to higher human motivations. Humans inherit some drives, but many goal objects and behavior patterns are acquired historically and culturally. So theories built mainly on rats risk missing the most human parts of motivation (meaning, purpose, symbolic goals).
11. Motivation occurs within a situational/cultural field. "Human motivation rarely actualizes itself in behavior except in relation to the situation and to other people. Motivation rarely shows itself as behavior outside of context and relationships, so theory must account for environment and culture. But Maslow warns against treating the organism as just another object in the field "  We  must remember that the individual partly creates his field, his barriers and his objects of value, that they must be defined  partially in  terms set  by the particular organism in  the field.  "
12. Account for both integration and partial/segmental responding. Although the organism is typically an integrated whole, people can also show isolated habits, dissociations, and segmental responses—especially under threat or overload. Some apparent “disintegration” may reflect shallow analysis, but some is real and sometimes adaptive (saving core resources for bigger problems). Motivation theory must be able to model both unified and non-unified functioning

    Apparently the organism is most unified in its integration when it is successfully facing a major problem or a threat or emergency.  But when the threat is  overwhelming or when the organism is too weak or helpless to manage it, it tends to disintegrate.   On  the whole when life is easy and successful  the organism can simultaneously do many things and .turn in many directions.... ...  Furthermore it is now becoming more and more clear that such  phenomena  are  not  necessarily  to  be  regarded as weak or bad or pathological.  Rather they are often to be regarded as evidence of  one of the 'most important capacities of the organism, viz.,  to deal with unimportant or with familiar or with easily conquered problems in a partial, specific, or segmental fashion so  that the main capacities of the organism are still left free for the more  important  or  more  challenging  problems that .it face

Abraham Maslow Index

• Aggridant
• B-Cognition
• B-Needs
• B-Realm
• B-Values
• Being-Guilt
• Big Problem
• D-Cognition
• D-Realm
• Deficiency Diseases
• Diminished Human Being
• Eupsychia
• Eupsychian Education
• Eupsychian Management
• Eupsychian Psychology
• Eupsychian Theory
• Eupsychian Therapy
• Good Chooser
• Good Person
• Good Science
• Good Society
• Good Specimen
• Growing-Tip Statistics
• Hierarchy of Basic Needs
• Hierarchy of Cognitive Needs
• Horticultural Model
• Human Diminution
• Human Motivation
• Human Potential
• Humanistic Psychology
• Inner Signals
• Intrinsic Conscience
• Jonah Complex
• Metapathology
• Motivation
• Normalcy
• Normative Biology
• Peak Experience
• Plateau Experience
• Real Self
• Sculptural Model
• Self-Actualization
• Transcending Self-Actualizers
• Transhumanistic
• Transpersonal Psychology

Citation and Legal

Treat the SpiritWiki as an open-access online monograph or structured textbook. You may freely use information in the SpiritWiki; however, attribution, citation, and/or direct linking are ethically required.

Footnotes

References