In several previous studies on HIV prevention and HIV medication adherence, I used a model in which various Intuitive-level experiences have their effect on behavior by way of a mediating variable called "motivation." The title of one of my previous papers, "motivation as a mechanism," explains the way that I was thinking about this relationship between Intuitive-level variables 4 or 5 years ago. A student recently asked me whether I meant intrinsic or extrinsic motivation when I included the variable in my model. That question got me thinking again about the whole concept of motivation, and whether it really plays a role in determining people's behavior.
Motivation can be defined as "reasons for acting in a particular way," as a "desire to do something," or as "willingness to do something." My own use of the term has been most similar to the last of these definitions, "willingness," because I understand "reasons" as thoughts (e.g., control beliefs in my old model, which is a concept very similar to self-efficacy), and I think of "desire" as an emotional state (e.g., mood in my old model). Philosophers make distinctions between thoughts, feelings, and intentions, even though people often confuse these concepts; all three are part of the intuitive sense of causation that people without any psychological training use to make sense of their world, as described in Fritz Heider's attribution theory.
The distinction between thoughts, feelings, and intentions is illustrated in an example from Bayne (Chapter 9 in Pockett et al., 2009, Does Consciousness Cause Behavior):
Chloe the rock climber wants to rid herself of the weight and danger of holding another climber on a rope [feeling]. She then has an involuntary image of herself letting go of the rope [thought]. She reacts to that thought with horror [feeling] which distracts her enough that she actually does lose her grip on the rope [behavior]. Yet Chloe does not experience the act of letting go of the rope as something that she does as a conscious choice [intention], despite the action's link to both thoughts and feelings. Most people accordingly wouldn't blame her for the action because she didn't "mean to" let go of the rope.
In both our internal experiences and our system of laws, a person's intention is considered the most essential determinant of a behavior. A person's immediate intention to do something is what I meant when I used the term "motivation" in my prior model of behavior.
If we re-label the central element of my old model as intention instead of motivation, we get something that looks something like Ajzen and Fishbein's Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB), and indeed I'm still drawn to this intuitively appealing model of behavior. In particular, the TPB proposes that intentions are the closest predictor of actual behavior. The major problem with the TPB (Ogden, 2003) is that intentions only predict behavior some of the time. Specifically, if someone says that they don't intend to change their behavior, you can probably believe they will keep on their current course of action. But if the person tells you that they do have an intention to change, this tells you nothing about their actual chances of success. That phenomenon is what my colleagues and I have described as the "intention-behavior gap."
My idea in the earlier series of studies mostly had to do with when a person's intentions were measured. I had already seen a distinct difference between what people said was true for them when you asked via a survey completed in the moment, compared to what they remembered when you asked them how they felt "on average" over a longer past period of time. Maybe, I thought, the intention-behavior gap would disappear when motivation was measured using a daily survey close to the time that a behavior like taking medication was actually performed. The articles linked above in the first paragraph supported that hypothesis, with motivation emerging as the strongest single predictor of adherence or prevention behaviors, and also mediating the effects of other variables. In that sense, my earlier studies supported the key concept of temporal immediacy from Two Minds Theory, suggesting that intention does predict behavior but only when it's measured in the moment.
From a broader perspective, though, perhaps Two Minds Theory argues against my original notion of motivation as a mechanism through which thoughts and feelings have their effects on behavior. If motivation is understood as conscious intention, then it must be part of the Narrative mind, which I have argued is the only part of the mind that is aware of its own actions. Yet if motivation is a part of Narrative thought, then it can't have any direct effect on behavior because I also have argued that Narrative thinking is too slow to produce behavior! This seems like a significant contradiction in my thinking.
My student's question about intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation highlights the problem. The notion of motivational factors that are "internal" versus "external" to a person probably goes back to Heider's attribution theory in the 1950s once again. In 1971, psychologist Edward Deci completed a review that seems to have been the first use of terms intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivation. Besides his own work, Deci cites well-known psychologists Theresa Amabile and Albert Bandura, although I don't think that Bandura specifically talks about intrinsic motivation in his Social Cognitive Theory -- he uses more generic categories, like "psychological states" and "past experiences." More recently, Deci used the concept of motivation in his and Richard Ryan's Self-Determination Theory (SDT), which is much more specifically a model of health behavior. SDT predicts that environments supportive of a person's autonomy (aka self-determination, aka intrinsic motivation) will be more successful in producing behavior change. In the nursing literature around the same time as Deci's original work, Dorothea Orem proposed a theory based on the idea of "self-care agency," which has a lot of overlap with the idea of intrinsic motivation. “Agency” is broader in some ways, comprising a sense of control over life in general and an actual ability to get things done, two elements that are also included in Bandura's concept of self-efficacy. And separately in nursing, Nola Pender’s Health Promotion Theory talks about “commitment to a plan of action,” which also sounds a lot like intrinsic motivation.
The measure of motivation that I have often used in my own studies isn’t specific about the source of a person's motivation (intrinsic vs. extrinsic), but it is probably closest to commonly used measures of intrinsic motivation with items like “I want,” “I intend,” “I plan to,” etc. That would put my earlier research squarely in line with researchers like Deci, Orem, and Bandura who found that intrinsic motivation is a better predictor of behavior than doing something for reasons outside yourself. In the first publication on Two Minds Theory, the concept of “motivation” was replaced with the complicated term “activation based on projected consequences” (see the diagram on p. 113, or here). That seems a little more like extrinsic motivation because of the “consequences” part, but on the other hand it’s all “intrinsic” in the sense that it’s generated by the person him/herself. Extrinsic motivation seems to me more like a narrative – an idea of what gain you might receive from a behavior, which belongs in the top half of that same diagram. But on the other hand “I believe this will be good for my health” is a narrative also and would generally be considered an intrinsic motivator.
Where does this leave us? I would point out first of all that the intrinsic/extrinsic motivation studies have almost universally relied on retrospective survey measures about a period of time -- e.g., "in general, I'm motivated by money" versus "I usually do things that I'm interested in." These retrospective measures of intention tap into the Narrative mind, and all of the findings about one type of motivation versus another are therefore really findings about the type of narratives that may be most successful in sustaining behavior. Beliefs, likewise, are clearly features of the Narrative mind. Two Minds Theory does include a mechanism for narratives to shape behavior over a period of time; they do so by exerting an influence on the Intuitive system. But in general, the Narrative-mind definition of "motivation" would not be expected to affect behavior. Desires, on the other hand, seem to be more strongly rooted in the Intuitive mind, and if motivation is seen as "desire" then there's no contradiction between Two Minds Theory and my earlier findings. But of course I didn't mean it that way. Intention is what I meant, and intentions can be understood to predict behavior only if we move away from the idea of an intention as "conscious, volitional control over behavior."
My working hypothesis right now is that intentions measured at some remove in time aren't good predictors of behavior, because that moves us to a Narrative-mind definition of intention. That's exactly the scenario that leads to intention-behavior gaps, as in the Theory of Planned Behavior findings reviewed above. Yet a measure of intentions (i.e., motivation) taken right at the point of behavior might be a more accurate predictor because it taps into the same Intuitive-level processes that actually generate the behavior. That's what I have found in several previous studies. Whether these intentions are "intrinsic" or "extrinsic" may not matter -- I think that's a distinction between different types of narratives only.
The strength of the motivation instead might be the determining factor, and that might be fed by things like emotional desires, core beliefs about oneself, or other noncognitive variables like blood glucose level or fatigue. I still think that the idea of motivation is useful in explaining behavior, but I now believe more strongly than ever that real-time measures of motivation are necessary to advance our understanding.
Comments
Post a Comment