Psychology for Dummies (20 page)
Read Psychology for Dummies Online
Authors: Adam Cash
Tags: #Psychology, #General, #Body; Mind & Spirit, #Spirituality
In This Chapter
Discovering why we do the things we do
Feeling important
Running hot, cold, and in between
Possessing a mind of their own
Thinking before you act
Considering love and war
W hy do people get up and go to work every day? Why did my teenage cousin get her bellybutton pierced? Why do people go to the gym? What fun would psychology be if we didn’t get to ask all these interesting questions?
There isn’t always a lot of mystery behind why people do the things they do. Most of us work to make a living. We eat to stay alive. We pay our taxes to avoid going to jail. These things make sense to most of us, and we don’t usually give them much thought. But when someone does something extraordinary, extremely difficult, or horrific, we often find ourselves asking “Why?”
Traumatic experiences often leave us asking why, especially if the trauma is at the hands of another person. Trauma often leaves us feeling confused and in need of answers. Answers can help us come to terms with the way we feel. We often find ourselves asking why someone would do such a thing to another human being. But our quest for answers isn’t always focused on the negative. Take Mother Teresa, for example. She dedicated the greater part of her life to working with the sick and the poor in India. She lived in abject poverty, sacrificing all comfort in order to help the poor and seemingly forgotten. Why would she do such a thing? Mother Teresa’s dedication to her religious calling and duty was remarkable. She endured harsh conditions and stayed the course. Were her actions a result of love for the people she worked for? Whatever her motivations were, they were strong and unyielding.
In this chapter, I introduce the psychological approach to motivation. Simply knowing the nuts and bolts of an action leaves a gaping hole in our understanding, if we don’t know why people do what they do, or at least why they think they do the things they do.
In addition to exploring the various theories of motivation, I also take a look at emotions, which some psychologists feel are the primary motivating factors for all of us. Psychologists make a big deal about emotions because of their central role in human behavior and mental processes. “Why we do what we do” has a lot to do with the way we feel.
The big joke about going to a psychologist is that she’ll ask, “How does that make you feel?” What’s the big deal about feelings and emotions? Being hungry or tired can be important. Wait a minute though. Is hunger a feeling? What about being tired? It seems like some people wouldn’t know an emotion if it crash-landed on their doorstep. Other people seem to be a little too “in touch” with their emotions. Hunger and fatigue are not considered emotions. But just like food and sleep, emotions are just as important to our psychological survival.
Tony Robbins has built a multimillion-dollar empire by helping people find their motivation. He’s a motivational speaker. I’m not familiar with the specifics of his technique, and I’m not even sure his approach to motivation really works. He’s got an army of celebrities endorsing him though. From a business standpoint, it doesn’t really matter whether or not it really works. The point is that people want to be motivated. People need to be motivated. People are spending a lot of money to find out how to motivate themselves the Tony Robbins way.
It’s hard to imagine life without motivation. Without motivation, I may just want to sit on the couch all day, eating chips and watching television. Not everyone wants to save the world or cure cancer! Whatever we do, psycho-logists who study motivation believe that some psychological process is responsible for our motivation.
Does a plant grow toward sunlight because it wants to? Would a little rebellious plant, the black sheep of ferns, grow toward the shade just to be different? A plant couldn’t perform this feat even if it wanted to. Plants grow toward the sunlight because they can’t help themselves. They need sunlight in order to survive. That’s an instinct.
An
instinct
is an automatic, involuntary, and unlearned behavior that occurs in response to a specific trigger, or
stimuli.
Numerous examples of what we consider human instincts can be found in phrases that we use every day: the maternal instinct, the survival instinct, the killer instinct, the gut instinct, and so on. Instincts motivate us in the sense that we do what we do because we have to do it. It’s something we do automatically and involuntarily.
James McDougall came up with a way to classify some of our basic instincts. Instincts are purposeful, and they guide our behavior toward the meeting of specific goals — like survival! McDougall believed that an instinct could be identified by identifying its intended goal. He identified numerous instincts, including parenting, seeking food, and mating. So don’t feel so bad about eating so many cheeseburgers, it’s just your food-seeking curiosity instinct driving you.
A lot of instinct research has been done with animals. Geese fly south for the winter. Why? Maybe they like the poolside bars in Florida, or maybe it’s instinct. Konrad Lorenz conducted extensive research exploring the instinctive behaviors of animals. Lorenz’s specific approach is known as the
ethological
approach to motivation, and according to Petri, an ethologist, instinctive behaviors have
action specific energy
— the idea that a specific trigger sets an instinct into action. All instinctive behaviors have a specific trigger or triggers, called
key stimuli.
Driving by a nice coffee shop is a key stimulus for my coffee instinct. Caffeine must have helped my ancestors survive. Key stimuli come from the environment. Key stimuli that come from other members of an animal group are called
releasers
.
Key stimuli produce behaviors that are fixed and automatic. These behaviors are called
fixed action patterns.
One of the popular examples of a fixed action pattern is something Konrad Lorenz called
imprinting.
Imprinting is kind of like a bonding instinct between a young animal and its parents. Remember that cartoon where the baby duck hatches from its egg and starts following around the first animal that it sees, even though it’s not a duck?
Would you like some adrenaline with that bear?We can thank evolution for any instincts we may possess. Over the course of human evolution, certain behaviors were naturally selected for (selected “to keep”) because they contributed to the ultimate survivability of the species. Imagine that there’s a group of people that live in a forest with wolves, bears, and various other dangerous beasts. Now, imagine that a group of three men and three women from this larger group encountered a bear. One man and one woman took off running the second they saw the bear, and they got away. Another man and woman stood there, frozen in their tracks. The final couple tried to fight the bear off with sticks and rocks. They lost.
If the man and woman who ran away decide to have a child, there’s a good chance that their child will be a runner, when it comes to encounters with bears. The other couples (the freezers and the fighters) died, so they can’t have children. This is a crude illustration of how evolution selects for traits that help us survive. Those who survive reproduce. We might assume that the couple that ran away had better instincts than the other two couples. Their instincts were better in the sense that they were able to stay alive. Instincts that help keep us alive stay in the gene pool.
