Published on August 8, 2024 5:05 AM GMT
This is a brief sketch of a theory of motivation.
Motivation drives action. It also causes the experiences of pleasure and pain. We experience pain when motivation increases, and pleasure when motivation decreases.
Motivation is generated by emotions, such as hunger, thirst and lust. Emotions generate motivation, and motivation generates action. Each emotion has a biological function. Hunger motivates eating. Thirst motivates drinking water. Lust motivates sex.
Some emotions react to stimuli. For example, if you are pricked with a pin, then you will experience pain. The pin activates sensory receptors in the skin (nociceptors), which send a signal to the brain, where it generates an emotional reaction. That reaction will motivate you to act in a way that avoids the noxious stimulus.
Behavior can be divided into two broad categories: avoidance and pursuit. Some emotions generate avoidance behaviors. Fear is a generic emotion that motivates avoidance. Other emotions, such as hunger, generate pursuit behaviors, such as seeking food. Emotions that motivate pursuit tend to build up over time, while emotions that motivate avoidance tend to be immediate reactions to stimuli. However, because we have complex, goal-directed behavior, we can act in advance to prevent future danger and harm, rather than just reacting to it.
Emotions are heuristic problem recognizers. They recognize biological problems, and generate the motivation to solve them.
Why do emotions generate motivation instead of action? Why is there an intermediate step? In some cases, a stimulus directly generates action, such as shivering when you are cold, or jerking your hand away from a hot stove. However, that stimulus-response mechanism can only generate simple behaviors.
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Although I'm not the author of this post (a friend of mine wrote it), I have created a PDF version of the essay that has a table of contents and headers to make it even easier to read.
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