Thinking about Social Phenomena:

Constructing Puzzles
Essay 1

“I am deeply motivated to do something. I, therefore, act on my motivation and do

it. Would you agree with these statements? Discuss, giving examples.”

Introduction
People who are deeply motivated construct an image of the destination that they want to reach
in their mind and dream about reaching there one day. But the paradox lies in the fact that most
people just don’t act upon this motivation to achieve this goal. Some keep hoping that a day
would come in which the dream that they envisioned would come true while others work on their
dream but fail to see it through. This may seem counterintuitive when thought about first but in
reality there are multiple psychological and biological mechanisms that intervene the person
from acting in their motivation.

In this essay I explore the various reasons for motivation and how short term and long term
parameters affect the person in acting on his/her motivation.

Motivation in the short run and the cruelty of

distractions
What if the motivation of a person is broken down due to an alternate task that might seem
more rewarding in the short term? This question can be explored using the Olds and Peter
experiment. This experiment explains that our brains operate on the basis of a perceived reward
system and that when the brain is exposed to a rewarding stimulus, the brain responds by
increasing release of the dopamine and thus the structures associated with the reward system.
There are multiple dopamine pathways in the brain that are activated when a certain reward is
perceived by the brain. These results were found by James Olds and Peter Milner in the 1950s
when they conducted experiments on rats by implanting electrodes in their brains and allowed
the animals to press a lever to receive a mild burst of electrical stimulation to their brains. This
experiment was significant because it appeared to verify the existence of brain structures that
are devoted to mediating rewarding experiences. This provides us evidence of a biological
mechanism to why people sometimes are distracted from doing the task that they were initially
motivated to do. Some other task might result in a higher dopamine reward from the brain which
in turn would lead to a distraction from the main goal in hand.

The Temporal Motivation Theory [P2] tried to provide a theoretical approach to understanding
motivation and acting upon that motivation by arguing that the perceived usefulness and benefit
of an activity increases exponentially as the deadline for completing nears. This theory defines
the concept of Impulsivity as the inability to resist non task-related urges and tries to explain that
a greater amount of time to the deadline means that there is less drive to do it right now. It
defines a formula given below:

Though this theory claims to provide a far fetched theoretical utopian solution of a complex
psychological problem, this may or may not be valid as human mind unlike gravitation is very
hard to be modelled using a formula; especially not one as simple as the one proposed in the
paper. But a good takeaway from the paper is that there exists an inverse correlation between
the amount of time left for the deadline and the amount of motivation a person has to achieve it.
This could possibly explain the prevalence of procrastination in people and why people get
distracted to perform trivial rewarding tasks in the short run as compared to focusing on the long
term goal that they had.

Motivation in the long run

Motivation is an inherent feature of all living beings, motivations are driven by needs, needs vary
from physiological necessities like food and water to having a sense of self esteem to becoming
the best version of oneself. Physiological needs are extremely critical for the normal functioning
of all the biological components of the human body while some other needs might lay their onus
on the mental state of a human being. This concept is explained by Maslow’s Hierarchy of
Needs[P4] in which he divides needs into five different tiers and each tier with their own
imperativeness factor. Based on this theory we can say that the motivation of a person is in
direct proportion to the imperativeness of the necessity. This theory when understood can be
taken as the solution for the byzantine problem of understanding the correlation between the
motivation and needs. But this doesn’t paint the picture of the modern society where people put
their goals and materialistic dreams in front of their health and safety. This proves to be a
counter example where human beings are motivated more to achieve the lower priority
components of the pyramid than the ones which have a higher priority.
Even when a person is deeply motivated to do something and when a dire need of completing
the task exists, there are cases when a person might lose motivation while engaging in the task
that initially motivated them. A rudimentary explanation for this might be that the person is
experiencing a burnout which according to the paper by Maslach et al.[P1], is defined as a
“prolonged response to chronic emotional and interpersonal stressors on the job, and is defined
by the three dimensions of exhaustion, cynicism, and inefficacy”. Even people who are highly
motivated to achieve a task might be roadblocked by a burnout which in turn results in a vicious
cycle of demotivation. This may lead to the person stopping the task entirely which in turn would
result in incomplete work. Burnout is a common example in many workplaces where there is no
shortage of work to be completed and people are highly motivated to complete as much work as
possible so that they can get the reward of a pay rise, but a prolonged exposure to stress and
competition with oneself would result in inefficiency, cynicism and exhaustion resulting a
burnout.
But a burnout is a temporary feeling and only a small percentage of people drop the task they
started. The burnout theory also does not provide a clear cut reason on a direct correlation
between motivation and success in completing a task.

The expectancy of a pay rise is the prime motivator of an average salary worker to complete a
certain task in their office, this end goal could also be used as parameter in modelling the
motivation of a person. The usage of the outcome to model the behaviour of a person is
explained in the Expectancy Theory[P3]. The theory explains motivation based on three elements
which include the belief that the effort will result in your desired goal, the belief that a reward is
waiting if the performance expectations are met and the value a person places on the reward.
Hence based on these three factors, a person could either be highly motivated to achieve the
task or not. If these three factors are very high then the person would have a higher motivation
level and would be consistently motivated through long chunks of the time period. Though they
might be affected by the short term stoppers like procrastination, they will eventually find a way
to be motivated again in the long run. But if these three factors aren’t high then a person might
not have a consistent motivation and may stop acting on his/her motivation at some point of
time.

Conclusion
From these various theories that try to explore and explain the puzzle of motivation in human
beings, we can understand that just motivation alone does not imply that the person would act
on the motivation. The person can be hindered due to multiple factors and has to keep moving
on in the direction of completing the task even when they are not motivated to do so to complete
the task. Human motivation can be approximately modeled as an “U” shaped graph of
motivation with respect to time in which a person is initially highly motivated but later the
motivation drops till the deadline of completing the task approaches. These short term and long
term obstacles are not a full stop for a person to achieve a task instead they are obstacles that
test the person's willingness to achieve the final goal over a few obstacles. These make the
experience of achieving a goal exponentially more remarkable.

References:

Academic Papers/Books:
[P1]. Christina Maslach , Wilmar B. Schaufeli , Michael P. Leiter, Job Burnout, Annual
Review of Psychology
[P2]. Ide Bagus Siaputra, Temporal Motivation Theory: Best Theory (yet) to Explain
Procrastination, ANIMA Indonesian Psychological Journal
[P3]. Fred C. Lunenburg, Expectancy Theory of Motivation: Motivating by Altering
Expectations, International Journal of Management, Business, And Administration
[P4]. A. H Maslow, A theory of human motivation, Psychological Review

Websites:
[W1].
https://www.neuroscientificallychallenged.com/blog/know-your-brain-reward-system
[W2].
https://www.brainfacts.org/thinking-sensing-and-behaving/learning-and-memory/2018/m
otivation-why-you-do-the-things-you-do-082818
[W3].
https://contactzilla.com/blog/5-psychological-theories-motivation-increase-productivity/