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Motivation is a messy concept, because all of psychology is trivially about motivation—anything that speaks to how we think and act speaks to what moves us. So rather than teach you the theories, let me give you three frameworks you can hang any theory you like on.
Motivation is a messy concept, because all of psychology is trivially about motivation—anything that speaks to how we think and act speaks to what moves us. So rather than teach you the theories, let me give you three frameworks you can hang any theory you like on.
A brain scientist talking about (better) patterns of thought, of feeling, and of action. One pattern, one podcast—you see if it works for you. The btrmt. lectures, with Dr Dorian Minors. (btrmt.—said "betterment.")
Why motivation is such a messy idea
The problem with motivation is that it's a pretty messy construct. A
messy idea, a messy concept to think about. Because although there's
a sub-discipline of psychology typically called the psychology of
motivation, really, all of psychology is trivially about motivation.
To contextualise that, you can make some rough distinctions in the
sciences of mind.
You have psychology, which is interested in how and why people
behave in certain ways. You have cognitive science, interested in
how people think about stuff and the ways in which thinking happens.
And you have neuroscience, interested in how the architecture of the
brain and the nervous system works to produce those things.
Looking at those high-level distinctions, you see that psychology
and cognitive science—and to a lesser extent neuroscience—are
all about exploring what kinds of things make people think and act.
How do people come to think certain ways and act certain ways? And
that really is what motivation is, at the highest level of
abstraction. So it's not straightforward to tease the motivational
aspects of psychology out into a sub-discipline, separate from
everything else that makes people think and act. What is motivation
except those things that make people think and act in certain ways?
Different kinds of wanting
What seems to matter is how you come at motivation. You could think,
for example, that I'm motivated to drink. That motivation could be
prompted by some biological mechanism—whatever it is that monitors
the amount of water in your cells. That's a motivation. But is it
the motivation you care about? It's certainly not the same kind of
motivation that gets you listening to your Spotify daily mix to find
new songs. They're different motivations. One's biological, one
might be social or cognitive or aesthetic. But they're both
motivations.
And even at the biological level, there's a mechanism that makes you
thirsty because your cells are too dry. But there's also the
motivation to drink because you're [anticipating there being less
water in the
future](https://btr.mt/analects/predicting-human-behaviour)—a
fairly basic cognitive phenomenon which, if not biological, is
certainly closer to being thirsty than it is to browsing Spotify.
So it's messy. All of psychology captures things that motivate us to
think and act. And if that's true, how do we think about motivation?
That's fundamentally the question people have when they come to me
asking how to motivate people.
Three frameworks
The bright side is that you can cluster motivation into useful
chunks. There are some interesting frameworks that help us think
about what makes people do things, and they gather a lot of this
messy stuff into more tractable shapes.
Some of these are pretty standard. Some are my own, and a little
less mainstream. But what's best about them is that none of them
require any particular psychological theory. If you think at the
level of the frameworks, you can use whatever psychology you like to
solve the problem in front of you.
Content theories: what motivates us
The first framework is content theories of motivation. Content
theories talk about what motivates us. If you've heard about
motivation before, you've probably heard about content theories,
because they're also known as needs-based theories—Maslow's
hierarchy of needs lives in this category. We call them
content-based because it's about the content of the motivations
themselves; calling them needs-based concentrates more on the
person. It depends what you want to do with it, but they're
essentially the same thing.
The most quintessential example, the one you get taught straight
away in Psych 101, is the difference between [intrinsic and
extrinsic
motivations](https://btr.mt/analects/on-motivation-dichotomies). The
idea is: does the motivation to do something come from the doing of
the activity itself? Something intellectually stimulating, or that
fills you with purpose, or that you just enjoy. You're gardening
because you love being outside, being active, seeing things grow and
flourish. That's intrinsic.
Extrinsic motivators come from something external to the activity.
Getting paid for doing something, or being punished for not doing
it. You're not gardening because you like gardening; you're
gardening because you're a gardener and people pay you to fix up
their gardens.
Where the distinction breaks down
This one's useful, and there's a lot of literature around it,
because intrinsic motivators obviously help motivate people.
Well—I shouldn't say obviously. Intrinsic motivators have an
intuitive connection with better performance. If you enjoy doing
something for its own sake, you're probably more likely to do it
than if it rests on rewards or punishments. A lot of the literature
concentrates on that, and on how to make things more intrinsic.
I don't encourage it, because you really don't want to think too
hard about the distinction. What makes you enjoy an activity for
itself, and what's external to it, doesn't actually have a hard
boundary.
I like the example of becoming a vegetarian [for climate
reasons](https://btr.mt/analects/circularity-of-sustainability).
It's a common reason to become vegetarian these days, and it isn't
clear to me what's intrinsic or extrinsic about it. If I'm becoming
a vegetarian for climate reasons, it's probably because I don't want
the climate to become unliveable. I want the planet to maintain
itself roughly as it is. That seems extrinsic, because I'm not doing
it for the vegetarianism itself—I don't enjoy vegetarianism, I'm
doing it because I want to save the planet. But I probably also feel
that's an important thing to do, and it ties together under a banner
of taking action on the climate, which feels intrinsic.
There's a lot of debate in the psychological literature about
altruism—doing things because they're good for someone else, with
no effect on you. Same problem. Is that intrinsic, because it feels
good to be altruistic? Or is it extrinsic, done for the other person
entirely?
You can port this into a lot of what people do and get yourself
wrapped around the axles. You could do something at work that isn't
pleasant. Maybe that's extrinsic—it sets you up for promotion, or
makes you look good at the next meeting. But maybe you also just
take pleasure in being good at your job, which seems more intrinsic.
Fortunately, you don't need to get into the margins most of the
time. Just knowing to what extent the thing someone is doing is done
for its own sake, and to what extent it's motivated by things
outside it—those are aspects of motivation you can tease apart.
Maslow's hierarchy
I mentioned Maslow, so let me use [Maslow's hierarchy of
needs](https://btr.mt/analects/hierarchy-of-needs) as another
example of a content theory, because people are often more familiar
with it.
It's usually illustrated with a pyramid. At the bottom are the needs
with the highest priority, the most urgent ones. At the top are the
needs that are less of a priority—things we don't seek as much if
the ones at the bottom aren't met to some extent. So at the bottom,
physiological needs and safety needs: I need a roof over my head, I
need water, I need food. Around the middle, more affiliative needs:
I need to belong, I need to feel love, I need to feel esteem for
myself. Up the top, cognitive needs—I need to be stimulated—and
aesthetic needs, I need beauty around me. And at the very top,
self-actualisation, fully realising yourself. Later, I think, Maslow
bolted on something about transcendence: connecting with something
greater than yourself.
The idea is that at the bottom you have what you could call
deficiency needs, things you need to maintain at a certain level
before you can seriously explore the higher growth needs. You're not
going to be especially interested in your aesthetic needs, your
desire for beauty, if you don't have enough food or water. It's not
that you don't have those needs. It's that they're not a priority.
What's nice about Maslow's model is that it gives you a bunch of
categories of things people need. If you're trying to solve a
motivation problem—why don't I want to do this?—you can think
about which needs are being prioritised right now. If I'm busy and
stressed, I'm probably focused further down the hierarchy than
further up. If I'm struggling with money, I'll be spending much more
time trying to fix that, or being preoccupied by it, than doing
anything growth-oriented.
Again: a framework that helps you think about the content of
people's motivations. These are the kinds of things that motivate
us.
McClelland, and the other needs models
Since it's rather trendy to bash Maslow—because it's so
popular—I should say it isn't the only cut on needs-based models.
One common critique is that it doesn't place much emphasis on
interpersonal needs. I
haven't read a lot of Maslow, so I don't know whether that's true of
his writing, but the hierarchy certainly implies they're less
important than you'd expect for a social animal. So there are other
theories that emphasise exactly that.
Relatedly, there are theories that narrow Maslow's list to a tighter
set. One we teach here at Sandhurst is [McClelland's
model](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Need_theory), which focuses on
three categories: the need for achievement, the need for affiliation
with others, and the need for power or influence over them.
So there are a few ways to think about content theories. The deepest
of them are probably the needs models, and there are heaps—I have
an article where I
go through a lot of them in great detail, which I don't honestly
recommend you read, but I'll link it anyway. You don't have to stick
to needs theories either; intrinsic and extrinsic motivation is
probably the best-known example of another kind.
The point is that you can zoom in or out as much as you like, or
cluster them however seems appropriate. Use whatever theory you
want. But one of the things you need to think about when you think
about motivation is what kinds of things motivate people. Content
theories. That's one.
Process theories: how motivation works
The next framework is process theories of motivation. Unlike
content theories, these aren't interested in what kinds of things
motivate us, but in the process by which we're motivated—how those
things move us.
I think process theories are pretty neglected. A little in the
psychological literature, but very much in implementation: in
schools, in institutions, in business. I think it's because process
theories are boring. But they're probably the highest-value
framework, because if you don't think about how we're motivated,
thinking about what motivates us isn't much use. You need a
content theory, but then you need a process theory to get that
motivational content actually working for you.
Normative and motivating reasons
Let me take a little dip into philosophy to explain why this is easy
to get tripped up on. In philosophy there's a distinction between
normative reasons and motivating reasons. Like intrinsic and
extrinsic, the boundaries are blurry, and I don't want to get into
that debate because [people far smarter than
me](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/reasons-just-vs-expl/) do it
already. But essentially, normative reasons are all the motivations
that might exist—anything you could point at and say that might
be why they did what they did.
The [Stanford
Encyclopedia](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/reasons-just-vs-expl/#MotExpRea)
has a good example: Othello. For those who don't know, Othello kills
his wife because his jealous ensign, Iago, convinces him Desdemona
has been unfaithful. The play is a tragedy because Desdemona is
innocent.
So there's no actual normative reason here. Desdemona wasn't
unfaithful, so there was no normative reason for Othello to kill
her—normative in the sense that, back in the day, crimes of
passion like this were seen as legitimate. But there is a
motivating reason. Othello believed Desdemona was unfaithful, and so
he was motivated to kill her. That's the difference between
motivating and normative.
The same is true in the other direction: there can be normative
reasons without a motivating one. Take vegetarianism and climate
change again. There are normative reasons—maybe I should be
vegetarian for climate reasons, maybe I should be part of the effort
to stabilise the climate. But perhaps I'm not actually motivated by
it. I don't have a motivating reason, even though a normative one
exists.
So there's an important distinction between the two. And if you only
look at content theories, what you're really doing is looking at the
possible normative reasons and not necessarily the motivating ones.
You need a way to connect them. You need a causal link between what
might motivate us and what actually did.
Expectancy theory
The best theory I've found for this is expectancy theory. You'll
find it in any psychology textbook, so it's easy enough to look up.
The idea is that there's a chain of questions we ask ourselves. The
first: what's the likelihood that our effort leads to performance?
Then: how likely is the performance that results to lead to some
desired outcome? And then: how likely are those outcomes to satisfy
our personal goals or needs? How attractive are the outcomes to us?
In real terms, imagine someone at work trying to think about how to
spend the spare time they've got coming up. There are two options.
They could go really hard on a big client pitch. But at the same
time, they have a lot of maintenance work, and a lot of to-dos are
stacking up. What are they going to work on? What are they going to
be motivated to do?
So we ask the questions. First, is the effort going to lead to
performance? If I'm putting the package together, rehearsing it,
doing deep research on the market sector, then yes—the pitch gets
delivered to a high standard. Is that performance going to lead to
desired outcomes? The bonus I'd get for signing the client, or being
seen by people who could promote me. And how do those map onto my
personal needs and goals? Am I looking for a promotion? A bonus?
What kinds of things motivate me—and we're back to the content
theories.
Whereas we could look at just managing the backlog of to-dos. The
effort here is sustained attention to the things we need to
maintain, staying on top of the queue. The performance is that the
rest of our work is produced on time—not that the pitch is done,
but that the rest of the job is kept stable. The outcomes might be a
reputation for being good at our job, a reputation for reliability.
And how do those map back to our needs, our wants, our desires?
You can triage each of these. If we're bad at PowerPoint, like I am,
is effort going to be linked to performance? Maybe not—maybe it
relies on somebody else for the slides, or the market research. In
that case the chain is broken. We're not going to be motivated to do
it, because effort doesn't link to performance. Similarly, if the
pitch isn't that important, if we've been brought in last minute and
I'm not going to get the credit, then it isn't linked to the
outcomes. And if I'm happy with the money I'm earning and happy with
my position, the outcomes might not be linked to my personal goals.
You can do the same triage for the to-do list. Is
effort—consistent attention to the tasks—connected to
performance? I'm turning work around on time, so maybe. Probably.
But maybe my to-do tracking is broken, or I don't have a good sense
of what's required of me, and so effort isn't connected to
performance. And if nobody cares what I'm doing, maybe performance
isn't connected to outcomes, and I'm not getting that reputation for
reliability.
So you can triage the motivation problem by walking through the
steps. Is effort linked to performance? Is performance linked to
some outcome you care about? And to what extent do you care about
the outcome?
That's expectancy theory. There are a handful of these, because
management consultants in particular like them: [equity
theory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equity_theory), goal-setting
theory, and [self-determination
theory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-determination_theory),
which is very complicated and covers a lot of ground—it seems to
be trying to absorb all of psychology—but parts of it cover this
as well. I like expectancy theory, but the theory doesn't matter.
What matters is that you have some kind of process framework linking
the things people are motivated by to how they're actually
motivated.
Conditioning, which is also a process theory
Before I move on to my final category, let me point out one more,
just to make clear how messy the idea of motivation is. It seems to
me like a process theory of motivation, and it's
classical and
operant
conditioning.
Classical conditioning is about how the body learns relationships in
the environment. We learn that something in the environment predicts
something we want or don't want. If I pull my hand back to punch
you, that usually predicts getting hit, so you flinch out of the way
automatically. Or you hear the ice cream van, which predicts
delicious ice cream, so your mouth starts to water. You've been
conditioned by the environment: something predicts something else,
and your body responds automatically.
Operant conditioning, the related concept, is how we can be trained
to behave through reward and punishment. You teach your dog tricks
by giving it food every time it does something like the trick, until
it learns to do it properly. Or the spanking of children, which
people think punishes the child out of doing something. I think the
literature disagrees with them, but that's fundamentally the idea.
Both of these are process theories of motivation—how we come to be
motivated by things. Classically, our body learns relationships in
the environment; in the operant way, we're taught to behave in
certain ways in the face of rewards and punishments. Very closely
related concepts, not normally considered motivation theories. But
there you have it. All of psychology is motivation.
Maintenance theories: keeping it going
So we've had content theories—what kinds of things motivate
us—and process theories—how those things motivate us. Now I want
to talk about my own bespoke category, which I call maintenance
theories. They aren't classically considered motivation frameworks,
but this is my podcast, so I get to do what I want.
I think it's important to separate how things motivate us from how
to keep motivation going, because the same things don't motivate us
all the time. You can't just pick a content theory and a process
theory and call the problem solved. You probably also want a model
of how to change that over time, in response to events.
Thinky and less thinky motivations
Let me illustrate why with something I care about in the content I
produce. There's a distinction you can make between more thinky and
less thinky motivations. You might know it as
dual process theory,
thinking fast and slow, or system one and system two thinking. We
make this distinction a lot in the social sciences—biological
versus cognitive motivations, rational versus irrational, conscious
versus unconscious.
These distinctions all matter in their own right and their own
context. But I want to pull out one aspect, because the intuition
that we have more thinky and less thinky motivations can be
summarised, for our purposes, as urgent and passionate motivations
on one side, and more future-oriented and less pressing ones on the
other.
You could imagine I might be motivated to hit somebody for insulting
me. That's an urgent motivation. But there's a cooler, more
future-oriented motivation—that if I hit somebody, I'm going to
get done for assault, and that wouldn't be sweet, so maybe I
shouldn't. These two live in contradiction with one another. And
what most people want of me is to not hit people, so what we do is
design systems around developing the thinky motivations and not
encouraging the [non-thinky
ones](https://btr.mt/analects/no-action-without-emotion). We develop
future-oriented perspectives, and try not to encourage the more
passionate motivations that bubble up in us.
That matters because, over time, different things motivate us
differently. To maintain motivation on the things we want to
maintain it on, it isn't enough to think about the process—both
thinky and non-thinky motivations have processes. We have to think
about putting a structure around maintaining the thinky ones. The
motivations that make us do good over the long term.
Herzberg's hygiene factors
Another model useful here, though a little hard to describe, is
[Herzberg's two-factor
theory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-factor_theory). A lot of
people characterise this as a content theory, but I think it's more
about maintaining motivation than about what kinds of things
motivate people.
Herzberg reckoned there was a difference between motivators and
what he called hygiene factors. Motivators bring satisfaction in
the doing of whatever it is we're motivated to do. Hygiene factors
prevent dissatisfaction. He called them hygiene factors because they
maintain motivation to do the thing, just as hygiene maintains your
health.
Say we want somebody to do something for us. A motivator might be
that the thing itself is satisfying—intrinsically motivating, if
you like. A hygiene factor would be that we're paying them, and if
we stop paying them they won't do it at all. It doesn't necessarily
bring them satisfaction; it's a prerequisite for the job at hand.
And what you'll notice is that it's an extrinsic motivator.
If you'd only paid attention to content theories—intrinsic and
extrinsic—you might think you should concentrate on the intrinsic
value of what you're doing. But that neglects what maintains you
in doing it. Even if something is satisfying, there might be hygiene
factors that allow you to do it at all. Even if the person we want
something from finds the work satisfying, they can't do it if we
don't pay them enough.
Maslow's hierarchy groups into two clusters this way as well:
deficiency needs and growth needs. If I don't have a roof over my
head, if I can't get food and water, I'm not going to engage much in
growth needs like self-actualisation. One is the thing that
satisfies me—maybe I love engaging my aesthetic needs, my
self-actualisation needs—but I won't be interested in those if the
hygiene factors, the deficiency needs, aren't there at an
appropriate level.
McKinsey's influence model
Another model I've used a lot is McKinsey's influence model. There's
a book on it, which I'll link in the show notes, but essentially
we're more likely to keep doing things if four things are present:
if we know why we're doing the thing; if we can see others doing
it, and how; if we have the skills to do it; and if we have
mechanisms in place to support us doing it.
Say I'm telling a student to produce an essay for me. First, they've
got to know why—this is going to help you in your exam. Then
they're going to want to see examples: how do other people do this,
so they can get an idea of how to do it themselves? And everybody
else in the class is doing it, so they'll want to be part of that.
But they won't be able to if they don't have the skills. And
obviously they need the means—a laptop, or whatever it is. All of
these need to be present, not just one, to maintain them in that
motivation.
What you actually need
So it isn't enough to concentrate on what motivates us—content
theories—or how things motivate us—process theories. We also
want some framework for how to maintain it over the long term. And I
think that's worth its own category.
That's it. Three frameworks for thinking about motivation that don't
really care which theory you use. I just think you need all three
present to be better at motivating yourself and other people.
Motivation is a really messy concept with a sprawling literature. To
get to the point of explaining this to you—regardless of how well
you think I did—I've been through three or four iterations of
putting the content together. It isn't an easy concept to pass on,
and you can see, even in the explanations I gave you, how they leak
into each other.
But I think these three groupings are the ingredients you need to be
successful at motivating people, or at getting yourself motivated.
You need a theory about what kinds of things motivate you: a content
theory. You need a theory about how that content motivates you:
what's the process? And you need a theory about the maintenance of
that motivation, once you've got the other two.
And if you have that, then the fact that all psychology is
motivational psychology stops mattering so much. You can pick any of
these theories to plug the gaps, as long as you have something in
each of those three frameworks.
A little Dorian guide to life. I'll leave it there.