Psychology: Accepting Motivations and Purpose

[rousseau]

Blog post written by me:

Some time in the past two years, I can't quite remember when, I found and downloaded a book called 50 Psychology classics. At the time I was fairly interested in psychology, finding that a lot of the ideas contained within the field helped me better understand myself and my motivations, so I was actively looking for new ideas to incorporate into my world-view. Luckily, I found the mentioned title.

The book was broken down into 50, 2-3 page write-ups of some of the more popular psychological works of the past century. You'd get the main idea of the book as well as a short description of it. This was exactly what I wanted and was looking for.

Recently, I was having a conversation with a friend of mine and in the context of our conversation I thought about one of the theories in the book. The theory could be summed up with a phrase that's something like this:

"We become what we lack"

The idea behind the theory is that the core motivation driving most people's lives is underpinned by what they believe they are deficient in. Grew up without a lot of luck with the opposite sex? You might direct your life in a way that gets you a relationship. Grew up poor? You might constantly attempt to gain more and more power. Called dumb when you were a kid? You might try to prove your intelligence. The overarching idea is that what we believe we lack, is also what we want the most, and will be the central feature in how we direct our lives.

Personally, I think it's a very relevant theory, and definitely holds true for myself. It was an idea that led me to understand myself much, much better. Without getting into the details of how it's applicable to me, though, I'll transition into an idea that I wrote about around a year ago. A while back I wrote about how it'd be beneficial if we stop applying 'should' and 'shouldn't' to other people's actions. The premise was that we should do our best to just accept people for who they are, and let them be who they're going to be.

When you take that concept, you can also apply it to the motivations and purpose that drive people's lives. Sometimes it's easy to look at the way that people choose to carry themselves and think to yourself: "man, they're totally doing it wrong". But then, why? What is wrong, really? To them, that way is right. The purpose of others might be driven by arbitrary motivations, but to that person, whether they're aware of the underpinning motivations or not, what they're doing likely feels more real to them than you can imagine.

So in the past week or two I've found myself questioning the motivations of people I know. Not in a malicious way, but instead in a curious way, thoughts, trying to parse the problem of how others in my life are approaching their own life. What it eventually came back to, and what I eventually saw, was a bunch of people driving towards their inner purpose, whatever that could have been. I taught myself a lesson.

Back when I was in my upper years of university at Western I was a fringe part of some activist circles. The circles themselves weren't quite relevant, but rather the type of person that was a part of the circles. They were people who could look you in the eye and say: despite anything about you, you're ok, and we're going to hang out, have a beer, and be whatever the hell we want to be.

 

[Perspicuo]

Alfred Adler

 

[Bomb#20]

A while back I wrote about how it'd be beneficial if we stop applying 'should' and 'shouldn't' to other people's actions. The premise was that we should do our best to just accept people for who they are, and let them be who they're going to be.

"We"? Don't you mean "I"?

 

[rousseau]

A while back I wrote about how it'd be beneficial if we stop applying 'should' and 'shouldn't' to other people's actions. The premise was that we should do our best to just accept people for who they are, and let them be who they're going to be.

"We"? Don't you mean "I"?

Yep, wasn't lost on me either. I missed that 'should'.

 

[untermensche]

I don't believe most motivations are very well perceived.

Like dreams random motivations can be put into a nice narrative by those wanting to do so.

But I don't buy it.

We are social animals, apes.

Our motivations are about sex and our perceived place in the "tribe".

They have nothing to do with this artificial world and phoney goals we have created.

I agree with Freud in that many of our motivations are a sublimation of other deeper motivations.

 

[Speakpigeon]

I don't believe most motivations are very well perceived.

Like dreams random motivations can be put into a nice narrative by those wanting to do so.

But I don't buy it.

We are social animals, apes.

Our motivations are about sex and our perceived place in the "tribe".

They have nothing to do with this artificial world and phoney goals we have created.

I agree with Freud in that many of our motivations are a sublimation of other deeper motivations.

I don't see why all human beings should be necessarily following this dictum (or any other for that matter). Living organisms are not perfect. There certainly are statistical tendencies but social life and random variations do put a spanner in the logic of sex. People love simple explanations but social life is nothing if not complex. It may even be partially understood as an effective derivation from sex and in this case it becomes misleading to claim that sex is the motivation! Also many people have all sorts of quirky failures in their DNA or in some organ or other that may just make sex disappear altogether as motivation or maybe just reduce it to one species of meaningless entertainment. Sublimation too may be real in some or even in many cases but in many people it doesn't seem to feature at all. Psychology may be useful but one should not forget that anything about our behaviour and our physiology is only statistical. It's fair to say to many people are quite removed from the prototypical human being and there are very many different ways one can be removed in this sense. It's not for nothing that psychology is still lagging behind as a science.
EB

 

[Speakpigeon]

how it'd be beneficial if we stop applying 'should' and 'shouldn't' to other people's actions. The premise was that we should do our best to just accept people for who they are, and let them be who they're going to be.

You shouldn't tell me that I shouldn't tell people they shouldn't do whatever they do I don't like. I resent that. They do what they like. You do what you like. So I want to do what I like.


The degree to which we extend the scope of our prespriptions is the main factor in social cohesion. Our nature is different from that of ants but the progressive integration of social life over the entire planet is increasingly affecting the cursor of our nature.

So I don't know what we should do.
EB

 

[rousseau]

I don't believe most motivations are very well perceived.

Like dreams random motivations can be put into a nice narrative by those wanting to do so.

But I don't buy it.

We are social animals, apes.

Our motivations are about sex and our perceived place in the "tribe".

They have nothing to do with this artificial world and phoney goals we have created.

I agree with Freud in that many of our motivations are a sublimation of other deeper motivations.

I agree.

Our motivations can be understood in various levels of context.

Physiologically, our motivations are constrained by the need to eat, rest, drink, be warm. Everyone needs to do those things in some way. But as our motivations become more emergent, how we accomplish that goal changes. One's idea of doing this successfully may be very different from the idea of another, and the end result can be drastically different.

 

[Perspicuo]

I don't believe most motivations are very well perceived.

Like dreams random motivations can be put into a nice narrative by those wanting to do so.

But I don't buy it.

We are social animals, apes.

Our motivations are about sex and our perceived place in the "tribe".

They have nothing to do with this artificial world and phoney goals we have created.

I agree with Freud in that many of our motivations are a sublimation of other deeper motivations.

I agree, but with one difference in accent. Our social goals are built upon (versus "nothing to do with") the instinctive ones. For example, in religions and religious behaviors, we can glean the fear of death, tribal instincts (the need to belong, the rejection of the imagined "outsider"), need to control sexuality and aggression, narcissism (we're the holy ones, or rather, let's identify with the sinless and victorious leader).

In politics and patriotism one finds this too, including the weaving of glorious myths and heroic past where purity and clarity of purpose exists (in contrast to the present... and in contrast with historical reality!). In our personal lives this happens all the time, especially when arguing with someone else, generally a significant other, when we have supposedly perfect recollections and purity of intent -as opposed to the rest of the time when we fight with ourselves and beat ourselves up for being imperfect.

 

[untermensche]

I don't believe most motivations are very well perceived.

Like dreams random motivations can be put into a nice narrative by those wanting to do so.

But I don't buy it.

We are social animals, apes.

Our motivations are about sex and our perceived place in the "tribe".

They have nothing to do with this artificial world and phoney goals we have created.

I agree with Freud in that many of our motivations are a sublimation of other deeper motivations.

I agree, but with one difference in accent. Our social goals are built upon (versus "nothing to do with") the instinctive ones. For example, in religions and religious behaviors, we can glean the fear of death, tribal instincts (the need to belong, the rejection of the imagined "outsider"), need to control sexuality and aggression, narcissism (we're the holy ones, or rather, let's identify with the sinless and victorious leader).

In politics and patriotism one finds this too, including the weaving of glorious myths and heroic past where purity and clarity of purpose exists (in contrast to the present... and in contrast with historical reality!). In our personal lives this happens all the time, especially when arguing with someone else, generally a significant other, when we have supposedly perfect recollections and purity of intent -as opposed to the rest of the time when we fight with ourselves and beat ourselves up for being imperfect.

My position is that our motivations were firmly in place before we constructed this world with it's artificial pecking orders and power structures.

Our motivations were formed while living in very small groups in isolation.

Thus people with more than they could possibly use acquire more and more because our motivations have nothing to do with this world we have created. They are related to a world where an individual could only take so much because people lived in the open.

 

[rousseau]

I agree, but with one difference in accent. Our social goals are built upon (versus "nothing to do with") the instinctive ones. For example, in religions and religious behaviors, we can glean the fear of death, tribal instincts (the need to belong, the rejection of the imagined "outsider"), need to control sexuality and aggression, narcissism (we're the holy ones, or rather, let's identify with the sinless and victorious leader).

In politics and patriotism one finds this too, including the weaving of glorious myths and heroic past where purity and clarity of purpose exists (in contrast to the present... and in contrast with historical reality!). In our personal lives this happens all the time, especially when arguing with someone else, generally a significant other, when we have supposedly perfect recollections and purity of intent -as opposed to the rest of the time when we fight with ourselves and beat ourselves up for being imperfect.

My position is that our motivations were firmly in place before we constructed this world with it's artificial pecking orders and power structures.

Our motivations were formed while living in very small groups in isolation.

Thus people with more than they could possibly use acquire more and more because our motivations have nothing to do with this world we have created. They are related to a world where an individual could only take so much because people lived in the open.

Sure, but can't you see that there are different 'levels' of motivation? That you can put the concept of motivation into different contexts?

What about people that are born extremely wealthy? Can you frame everything about all of their motivations in terms of maintaining basic survival if they are no longer interested in wealth at all?

What Perspicuo and I were saying is that, yes, biological constraints mean that we have fundamental needs and desires that act as the core driver, but because of the complexity of society people's values and world-views can cause them to take wildly different paths toward that underlying goal, via divergent overlying goals.

The overlying and underlying motivations are both relevant, and both lead to a better understanding of people, but neither alone paint the complete picture of human psychology.

 

[untermensche]

My position is that our motivations were firmly in place before we constructed this world with it's artificial pecking orders and power structures.

Our motivations were formed while living in very small groups in isolation.

Thus people with more than they could possibly use acquire more and more because our motivations have nothing to do with this world we have created. They are related to a world where an individual could only take so much because people lived in the open.

Sure, but can't you see that there are different 'levels' of motivation? That you can put the concept of motivation into different contexts?

What about people that are born extremely wealthy? Can you frame everything about all of their motivations in terms of maintaining basic survival if they are no longer interested in wealth at all?

What Perspicuo and I were saying is that, yes, biological constraints mean that we have fundamental needs and desires that act as the core driver, but because of the complexity of society people's values and world-views can cause them to take wildly different paths toward that underlying goal, via divergent overlying goals.

The overlying and underlying motivations are both relevant, and both lead to a better understanding of people, but neither alone paint the complete picture of human psychology.

You have competing strategies for survival, greed and cooperation.

In modern humans there is probably the possibility for either strategy to dominate thinking or for any mixture to exist. A person born wealthy many times has little need to cooperate so greed can predominate, in some.

So greed in the face of extremely assured survival can be traced back to the underlying need for survival. It is not related to present circumstance.

 

[rousseau]

Sure, but can't you see that there are different 'levels' of motivation? That you can put the concept of motivation into different contexts?

What about people that are born extremely wealthy? Can you frame everything about all of their motivations in terms of maintaining basic survival if they are no longer interested in wealth at all?

What Perspicuo and I were saying is that, yes, biological constraints mean that we have fundamental needs and desires that act as the core driver, but because of the complexity of society people's values and world-views can cause them to take wildly different paths toward that underlying goal, via divergent overlying goals.

The overlying and underlying motivations are both relevant, and both lead to a better understanding of people, but neither alone paint the complete picture of human psychology.

You have competing strategies for survival, greed and cooperation.

In modern humans there is probably the possibility for either strategy to dominate thinking or for any mixture to exist. A person born wealthy many times has little need to cooperate so greed can predominate, in some.

So greed in the face of extremely assured survival can be traced back to the underlying need for survival. It is not related to present circumstance.

You're not addressing my point, just re-iterating your point.

I'm not doubting anything your saying, I'm saying that "we're self interested" isn't the only way you can contextualize all human behaviour, there are other psychological drivers than physiology and perceived status, so the original theory posted in this thread is still relevant.

 

[untermensche]

You have competing strategies for survival, greed and cooperation.

In modern humans there is probably the possibility for either strategy to dominate thinking or for any mixture to exist. A person born wealthy many times has little need to cooperate so greed can predominate, in some.

So greed in the face of extremely assured survival can be traced back to the underlying need for survival. It is not related to present circumstance.

You're not addressing my point, just re-iterating your point.

I'm not doubting anything your saying, I'm saying that "we're self interested" isn't the only way you can contextualize all human behaviour, there are other psychological drivers than physiology and perceived status, so the original theory posted in this thread is still relevant.

You would have to be specific.

What are these drivers?

Why do most submit to the rat race? What is driving them beyond survival and a place in the "tribe"?

 

[rousseau]

You're not addressing my point, just re-iterating your point.

I'm not doubting anything your saying, I'm saying that "we're self interested" isn't the only way you can contextualize all human behaviour, there are other psychological drivers than physiology and perceived status, so the original theory posted in this thread is still relevant.

You would have to be specific.

What are these drivers?

Why do most submit to the rat race? What is driving them beyond survival and a place in the "tribe"?

Ok. Religion.

Religion is a human creation and so the core driver behind the existence of religion is evolutionary. For the creators of religion it allows them a way of life and a way to survive: an evolutionary driver. Let's call that layer 0 of the motivation behind the existence of religion and the participation of its members. Everything about religion can be described in the context of layer 0, as you seem to be explaining. But above that layer, and within a religious organization there are other aspects that are driving behaviour. Maybe a church member notices the difference he/she is making by organizing charitable donations, and suddenly receives well-being by helping others. Layer 0 can still describe that behaviour: ultimately the church member hopes to improve his/her fitness, but layer 0 alone isn't an adequate explanation of why the church member is taking that charitable action: maybe they receive a sense of fulfilment and purpose, maybe it assuages guilt from something in the past.. and so on.

So the point is if you want to be reductionist you can just say 'everything arises out of self-interest' and have a pretty good model of human behaviour, but there is much more information to be gleaned out of our behaviour than that. It's the difference between one person working for a non-profit and spending their life poor while helping others, and another becoming a CEO of a large corporation while hoarding all of their money. 'Self-interest' tells us that they're doing the same thing, but higher level layers paint a more detailed picture.

 

[untermensche]

You would have to be specific.

What are these drivers?

Why do most submit to the rat race? What is driving them beyond survival and a place in the "tribe"?

Ok. Religion.

Religion is a human creation and so the core driver behind the existence of religion is evolutionary. For the creators of religion it allows them a way of life and a way to survive: an evolutionary driver. Let's call that layer 0 of the motivation behind the existence of religion and the participation of its members. Everything about religion can be described in the context of layer 0, as you seem to be explaining. But above that layer, and within a religious organization there are other aspects that are driving behaviour. Maybe a church member notices the difference he/she is making by organizing charitable donations, and suddenly receives well-being by helping others. Layer 0 can still describe that behaviour: ultimately the church member hopes to improve his/her fitness, but layer 0 alone isn't an adequate explanation of why the church member is taking that charitable action: maybe they receive a sense of fulfilment and purpose, maybe it assuages guilt from something in the past.. and so on.

So the point is if you want to be reductionist you can just say 'everything arises out of self-interest' and have a pretty good model of human behaviour, but there is much more information to be gleaned out of our behaviour than that. It's the difference between one person working for a non-profit and spending their life poor while helping others, and another becoming a CEO of a large corporation while hoarding all of their money. 'Self-interest' tells us that they're doing the same thing, but higher level layers paint a more detailed picture.

We can look at the genesis of a religion by looking at Joseph Smith and the Mormons.

To me it looks like his efforts were mainly motivated by sex.

And of course religious leaders have a dominant role by either pretending to believe or by actually believing.

As far as followers of religion, this again is an effect of the social instinct. If one can't lead one can fit in by being a follower.

 

[fromderinside]

My position is that our motivations were firmly in place before we constructed this world with it's artificial pecking orders and power structures.

Our motivations were formed while living in very small groups in isolation.

Thus people with more than they could possibly use acquire more and more because our motivations have nothing to do with this world we have created. They are related to a world where an individual could only take so much because people lived in the open.

Sure, but can't you see that there are different 'levels' of motivation? That you can put the concept of motivation into different contexts?

What about people that are born extremely wealthy? Can you frame everything about all of their motivations in terms of maintaining basic survival if they are no longer interested in wealth at all?

What Perspicuo and I were saying is that, yes, biological constraints mean that we have fundamental needs and desires that act as the core driver, but because of the complexity of society people's values and world-views can cause them to take wildly different paths toward that underlying goal, via divergent overlying goals.

The overlying and underlying motivations are both relevant, and both lead to a better understanding of people, but neither alone paint the complete picture of human psychology.

Up to this point questions were being asked. The posts following this one are driving down a particular lane that has been driven since psychology became scientific in the mid 19th century.

The most interesting post came from speakpigeon who wrote:

The degree to which we extend the scope of our prespriptions is the main factor in social cohesion. Our nature is different from that of ants but the progressive integration of social life over the entire planet is increasingly affecting the cursor of our nature.

I sense he's getting at our orientation toward keeping ourselves safe from being killed by our own kind. Obviously we do obey those squirts and twitches requiring us to operate successfully. When we stack a consciousness on top of that we give having one a purpose, free will, which explains why we seems to be in control of what goes on. Under that we provide purpose to everything else whether it takes place independently of conscious thought or no.

I'm going to suggest a rationale a bit later after I've set up the complete situation.

For this I again refer to speakpigeon who wrote

Psychology may be useful but one should not forget that anything about our behaviour and our physiology is only statistical. It's fair to say to many people are quite removed from the prototypical human being and there are very many different ways one can be removed in this sense.

What I get from this is he correctly identifies two aspects of what we want to analyse, behavior and physiology, as statistical. Worse he correctly implies unexplained randomness generated by the statistical nature of these central components for scientific analysis in psychology require explanation if the being is, as humans certainly are, conscious.

Here's where discussions between Togo and FDI about the current status of the nature of 'free will' comes into play. If we are actually in control which would be contrary to what speakpigeon presents we should be able to explain our motive nature much as did as McClelland with his  Need for achievement theory and Freud with his hydraulic theory of personality ( Psychoanalytic theory).

Given what we know today about the structure and function of the human nervous and endocrine systems we can leave those theories by the roadside of bad scientific ideas. There are no unified functions for mind in the brain which we might have suspected given our random piece-wise accretion of function through evolution. Our physiology arrived where it is piecemeal opportunistically.

OK. Let me suggest our consciousness is constructed by us primarily as a means for us to present ourselves as acceptable or desirable to those around us. It is constructed from selective gathering of attentions into narratives we present and correct to those around us depending on how we perceive them trending to react. Our inherited basic natures have been stable since at least when animals developed spines are readily explainable in terms of evolutionary theory.

Our consciousness motivational theory is also explained by evolutionary theory consistent with it if we see it as a collection of attributes which have been evolutionarily exploited over the period of our becoming social beings (way before we were were recognizable as fish probably around the time we first became able to distinguish shapes and identify form whence odors arouse) used to maintain our status among kin as not threatening.

What I'm suggesting is we leave this free will based assertion we have motives internally generated for individual reasons with a construct based on us getting along which can be linked quite nicely with how our attributes (memory, sensory integration, and the like) developed within senses and and more metabolic and acquisitive capacities (predator, parent, and the like).

If there is a twinge of curiosity a career in comparative and cognitive neuroscience might be your cup of tea. Perhaps Sznycer, Schniter, Cosmides, and Tooby's Regulatory adaptations for delivering information: the case of confession
http://www.cep.ucsb.edu/papers/Szny...daptations for delivering information_EHB.pdf

A good introductory read which should be followed by a reading of Cosmides and Tooby since the late '80s, Daniel Wegner and Patrick Haggard and Lon Dylan Haynes over the last ten years.

 

[rousseau]

So describing the universe as arbitrary, random material is a sufficient explanation for everyone then? I buy that you can ToE almost anything, including human behaviour, but I don't buy that it's the only useful way of describing or explaining phenomena.

 

[fromderinside]

So describing the universe as arbitrary, random material is a sufficient explanation for everyone then? I buy that you can ToE almost anything, including human behaviour, but I don't buy that it's the only useful way of describing or explaining phenomena.

Never mind. I'm invisible.

 

[Horatio Parker]

You would have to be specific.

What are these drivers?

Why do most submit to the rat race? What is driving them beyond survival and a place in the "tribe"?

Ok. Religion.

Religion is a human creation and so the core driver behind the existence of religion is evolutionary. For the creators of religion it allows them a way of life and a way to survive: an evolutionary driver. Let's call that layer 0 of the motivation behind the existence of religion and the participation of its members. Everything about religion can be described in the context of layer 0, as you seem to be explaining. But above that layer, and within a religious organization there are other aspects that are driving behaviour. Maybe a church member notices the difference he/she is making by organizing charitable donations, and suddenly receives well-being by helping others. Layer 0 can still describe that behaviour: ultimately the church member hopes to improve his/her fitness, but layer 0 alone isn't an adequate explanation of why the church member is taking that charitable action: maybe they receive a sense of fulfilment and purpose, maybe it assuages guilt from something in the past.. and so on.

So the point is if you want to be reductionist you can just say 'everything arises out of self-interest' and have a pretty good model of human behaviour, but there is much more information to be gleaned out of our behaviour than that. It's the difference between one person working for a non-profit and spending their life poor while helping others, and another becoming a CEO of a large corporation while hoarding all of their money. 'Self-interest' tells us that they're doing the same thing, but higher level layers paint a more detailed picture.

We are not fully conscious beings. A good portion, perhaps most, of our mind is not available to us. And it decides much of what we do. So our own motivations are often a mystery.

What religion does, at its best for those who are receptive to it, is allow the conscious mind to commune with the subconscious. When ones attention drifts away during a ritual or a droning sermon, that's a good thing.

Primitive people are more emotionally integrated than we are; but they have the disadvantage of living in a supernatural world fraught with peril. So if a primitive man somehow decided he wanted to be a CEO and master the universe, he could give it a good run. OTOH, he might decide the river spirit has cursed and waste away and die.