1. PSYCHOLOGy lecture V: Motivation and needs Jolanta Babiak
Winter semester 2018/2019

2. Questions regarding motivated behavior
Why do young adults pursue higher education?
Why do we strive to achieve particular goals despite the high effort it involves?
Why do we invest our time in a relationship?
What makes us procrastinate?
Why do we quit in the middle of the path to achieve our desired end?

3. Sources of motivation Internal
Drives and incentives: equilibrium = homeostasis; disequilibrium = tension
Hunger, thirst
Instinctual behaviors
Some behavior is governed by instincts: tendencies that are necessary for survival
Animal instincts: communication of the location of food, mating trips, nests building
Human instincts: sympathy, sociability, love
Cognitive approach to motivation
Subjective interpretation of reality
Motivation by expectation of future events

4. Sources of motivation External
Fritz Heider: outcome of a behavior can be attributed to:
Dispositional forces
Situational forces
These attributions influence the way people behave

5. Behaviors influenced by interactions of motives: eating
Effective food intake requires an organism to accomplish 4 tasks:
Detection of the food need
Start and organize eating behavior
Control how much food is eaten and of what quality
Detect the satiety and stop eating
Cannon and Washburn’s experiment
Does full stomach terminates eating?

6. Brain involvement in eating behaviors
Dual-center model
Hunger center
Satiety center
Monitoring sugar levels in the blood
Particular hormones regulate appetite
Does our need for food depend only on the cues our body send us?

7. Psychological factors that motivate people to eat or to avoid food
What does culture has to do with eating habits?
Three meals a day or body cues?
Why do people become obese?
Nature or nurture?
Restrained versus unrestrained eating behavior
Restrained eaters are chronically on diet
They might be overweight
They might not deal well with stressful situations when their self-esteem is in jeopardy

8. Eating disorders Anorexia nervosa Bulimia nervosa
Occurs when a person weighs 85% of her expected weight but expresses intense fear of becoming fat
Genetically determined to some extent; perfectionism as a personal characteristic
Bulimia nervosa
Characterized by periods of out-of-control eating followed by behaviors of getting rid of excess calories
Body dissatisfaction: inaccurate perception of the body; impact of media images
These syndromes have serious medical consequences
In extreme cases may lead to death

9. Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs
Self-actualization: fulfillment of potential, goal achievement
Esteem:
Confidence, sense of worth and competence
Attachment:
Needs to belong, affiliate, to be loved
Safety:
Security, comfort, freedom from fear
Biological:
Food, water, oxygen, rest, release of tension

10. Motivation and personal achievement
What are motivational force that lead people to seek different levels of personal achievement?
Thematic apperception test: generating stories in response to a series of ambiguous drawings – studying fantasies and dreams
Need for achievement – McClelland (1953) individual difference in planning and pursuing one’s goal
High n Ach individuals display need for efficiency – they quit if they believe the task is too difficult; they need to get the same results for less effort

11. attributions Judgements about the causes of outcomes
Internal
External
Attribution can have effect on motivation
Stability
Variability
Specificity
globality

12. Attributional styles
The way people explain events in their lives can become lifelong, habitual attributional style
Optimistic versus pessimistic way of looking at the world impacts motivation and behavior
Optimistic attributional style – failure is caused by external forces which are unstable and specific
Pessimistic attributional style – causes of failure are internally generated, perceived as stable and global “doomed to fail” type of thinking

13. Motivation in Social psychology
Determining the causes of events: inferential tasks facing all social perceivers
Attribution theory – approach to describing the ways the social perceivers use information to generate causal explanations
Fundamental Attribution Error: people on average are more likely to attribute others’ behaviors to dispositional influences and underestimate situational influences
It is not ease to overcome FAE

14. Self serving bias Self serving bias –
leads people to take credit for their success and deny responsibility for failure
Dispositional attribution for success
Situational attribution for their failure
Serves short term self-esteem

15. Gerrig R.J. (2012). Psychology and Life, London, Pearson Education, Ltd. –
Chapter 11