What Is Motivation?

By David Johne


The two major non-psychological theories of motivation have been propounded by Plato in ancient times and by Machiavelli in the medieval times. Their focus is on the different types of desires of human beings to perform various activities. Some of the modern researches support the theory of Machiavelli, known as Machiavellianism, while the theory of Plato is termed as tri-partite theory of soul.

One of the most basic motivations for any organism, including human beings, is hunger. Hunger elicits the motivation to eat, which requires some kind of action or effort on the part of the organism to get the food required to satiate the hunger. As such, it is the psychological cause or purpose of any action by any living organism.

Extrinsic motivation allows people to perform activities with the explicit aim of attaining a specific outcome. The most common extrinsic motivating factors are either rewards for achieving something or threat of punishment for failure. Competition is a powerful extrinsic motivator, where an individual beats others and proves superiority, even though there might be no intrinsic motivator to win.

It is the inner drive in every organism to act or behave in a specific manner. If you have enough motivation, you might get up early in the morning and continue with your daily activities in a vigorous manner. If you do not have any motivation at all, you might be loitering around the house throughout the day in a lazy manner, doing nothing.

In contrast, Machiavellianism theory is the employment of duplicity and cunningness in general conduct or statecraft. Machiavelli proposed this theory of motivation in his treatise, Il Principe or The Prince. Psychologists use the principles of Machiavelli to explain the tendency of people to remain unemotional, detached from morality, and manipulate others.

Most of our motivations are basically from such internal drives, such as eating food to survive, the secretion of certain hormones that induce sexual desire, etc. However, the drive or the motivation could arise from external stimuli, such as the desire to gain power and position to prove one's superiority or amass money with a desire to earn more respect in the society.




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