Incentive motivation

One area within the study of human motivation that has proved fruitful is research on incentives. Incentive motivation is concerned with the way goals influence behaviour. For example, a person might be willing to travel across the city to dine at a special restaurant that served a favourite dish. On the other hand, that same person might not be willing to travel the same distance to eat an ordinary frankfurter. The two meals have different incentive values and motivate behaviour to differing degrees.

It is often assumed that the stimulus characteristics of the goal are what produce the goal’s motivating properties. Thus, the taste, smell, and texture of one food would motivate behaviour better than these qualities in another food. Unlike drives, which were thought to be innate, incentives are usually considered to be learned. An individual is not born preferring one goal over another, but rather these preferences develop as new goals are experienced. Incentive motivation is not restricted to goals associated with the primary motives of hunger, thirst, sex, or avoidance of pain. Indeed, one of the most important aspects of this type of motivation is that any goal one seeks can motivate behaviour. For example, the goal of obtaining a high-paying job could serve as a strong motivator for studying hard in school. Goals serving as incentive motivators do not even need to physically exist at the time they activate behaviour, such as might be the case for someone who is motivated to get high grades now in order to eventually get into medical school.

Theoretical explanations of incentive motivation have ranged from mechanical stimulus-response approaches based on classical conditioning to cognitive approaches emphasizing the learning of expectancies, as discussed in the section below. Several theories have emphasized the role of predictive cues in the development of incentive motivation. Researchers concerned primarily with human motivation have suggested that much of human behaviour can be understood as being directed toward specific goals.

Expectancy-value theory

According to expectancy-value theory, behaviour is a function of the expectancies one has and the value of the goal toward which one is working [expressed as B = f(E × V)]. Such an approach predicts that, when more than one behaviour is possible, the behaviour chosen will be the one with the largest combination of expected success and value. Expectancy-value theory has proved useful in the explanation of social behaviours, achievement motivation, and work motivation. Examination of its use in achievement motivation can serve to represent the various types of expectancy-value motivations.

Achievement was initially recognized as an important source of human motivation by the American psychologist Henry Murray in the late 1930s. Although Murray identified achievement motivation as important to the behaviour of many people, it was the American psychologists David McClelland and John Atkinson who devised a way of measuring differences in achievement motivation. These researchers used Murray’s Thematic Apperception Test (TAT), a series of ambiguous pictures about which people were asked to write stories (as a determination of personality traits), to measure differences in achievement motivation. Using a technique known as content analysis, the stories were scored for achievement imagery. Based on a substantial body of research, a theoretical model was developed that rested upon the fundamental concepts of expectancy and goal value.

The expectancy-value model of achievement motivation proposes that the overall tendency to achieve in a particular situation depends upon two stable motives—a motive for success and a motive to avoid failure—and the subjective evaluation of the probability of success in the situation. The motive for success is regarded as a relatively stable personality characteristic by the time adulthood is reached. One’s motive for success is believed to result from learning in prior achievement situations where the individual has performed successfully. Thus, someone who has, for the most part, had successful experiences in the past is thought to be highly achievement-oriented. The motive to avoid failure is also assumed to be relatively stable by adulthood and represents the compilation of those prior instances where achievement behaviours were unsuccessful. It is argued that someone who has made many unsuccessful attempts in achievement situations will develop a strong motive to avoid failure.

Since almost everyone has experienced both successes and failures during development, the theory assumes that each person has differing degrees of both motivation for success and motivation to avoid failure. These two motivations are opposing tendencies, and as a result the difference in strength between the two will determine whether a given individual is an “achiever” or not. People with high motivation for success and low motivation to avoid failure will be achievement-oriented, while people with strong motivation to avoid failure and weak motivation for success will try to avoid most achievement situations if possible.

The expected probability of success in a particular achievement situation is also important in this achievement theory. The theory predicts that persons highly motivated for success will tend to choose to participate in achievement situations that they judge to be moderately difficult, while the theory also predicts that people highly motivated to avoid failure will tend to choose tasks that they judge to be either very easy or extremely difficult. The choices made by people either highly motivated to achieve success or to avoid failure differ because of the differing value of easy, moderate, and difficult goals for these two types of people. The model mathematically predicts that goals that require moderate effort to achieve will have the greatest value for persons highly motivated for success. Stated another way, high achievers want to obtain goals that are difficult enough to have some value but not so difficult as to be impossible or so easy as to be worthless. Persons with strong motivation to avoid failure believe they are likely to be unsuccessful. For this reason, the theory predicts that they would prefer easy tasks where success is likely or tasks so difficult that little embarrassment would ensue if they fail.

Attempts to test these predictions have met with mixed results. Some studies have found that people scoring high in motivation for success do often choose tasks that they consider moderately difficult, while other studies have failed to find such results. Also, persons scoring high in motivation to avoid failure do sometimes choose very easy tasks, as the theory predicts, but often do not choose very difficult tasks as also predicted. Clearly much research remains to be done before the model’s accuracy in predicting achievement behaviour can be judged.

Attribution theory

A second major approach to achievement motivation rejects the expectancy-value formulation and analyzes instead the attributions that people make about achievement situations. In general, attribution theory concerns how people make judgments about someone’s (or their own) behaviour—that is, the causes to which they attribute behaviour. Considerable research has found that people typically attribute behaviour either to stable personality characteristics, termed dispositions, or to the situations that were present at the time the behaviour occurred.

In regard to achievement behaviour, the attributions of ability, effort, task difficulty, and luck are argued to be especially important in determining future achievement motivation. For example, when a person is successful at a task and attributes that success to ability, that person is likely to approach new achievement situations in the future. Similarly, if the success was attributed to an intense effort, future achievement behaviour would depend upon a willingness to expend such effort in the future. Task difficulty appears to be judged from social norms. If most people are unsuccessful at a task, it is judged to be difficult, and, if most people are successful, the task is judged to be easy. The attribution of success to task difficulty therefore, would be expected to modify future achievement behaviour. If success was judged to be due to the fact that the task was very easy, future achievement behaviour would not be expected to change much; however, success in a task judged to be very difficult might prompt a person to expand the range of tasks he or she is willing to attempt. Ascriptions of luck in an achievement task would also influence future achievement behaviour. Basically, luck is assumed when a person expects to have no control over the outcome in the task. Success attributed to luck is not expected to increase future achievement behaviour much, nor would failure attributed to bad luck be expected to decrease it much.

Research on the attributions people make in achievement-related situations suggests that the four causal ascriptions mentioned above and perhaps other ascriptions as well can best be understood as falling along three dimensions: locus, stability, and controllability. Locus refers to the location, internal or external, of the perceived cause of a success or failure. Ability and effort, for example, are seen as internal dispositions of a person, while task difficulty and luck are situational factors external to the person. Stability refers to how much a given reason for success or failure could be expected to change. Ability and task difficulty are stable and therefore not expected to change much, while effort and luck are unstable and could therefore change dramatically over time. Controllability refers to how much control the individual has over the events of the situation. Causes such as effort are considered to be controllable, whereas luck is uncontrollable.