Category: Motivation

The Promise of Affective Science and the Sociology of Emotions

The sociology of emotions is a curious subfield. On the one hand, the recognition that the study of emotions (and their dynamics) overlap with nearly every single thing sociologists care to study suggests they deserve central casting in the myriad studies that fill journals and monographs (Turner and Stets 2006). On the other hand, the sociology of emotions remains stuck in neutral, waiting for the sort of “renaissance” experienced by cognition when cultural sociology “discovered” schemas (DiMaggio 1997) and dual-process models (Lizardo et al. 2016, Vaisey 2009). This sort of paradox makes some sense, for emotions, or what founding sociologists like Cooley called sentiments, have nearly always been a part of the discipline. Weber’s most important typologies included affectual action and charismatic authority; as early as The Division of Labour, Durkheim had emotions front and center in his theory of deviance and crime; and, the aforementioned Cooley premised his entire social psychology on pride and shame transforming self into a moral thing. But, simultaneously, the study or use of emotions in sociological analysis remained mired in false Cartesian binaries (see Damasio 1994) that propped up misogynistic commitments to dichotomizing cognition (masculine) and affect (feminine), while also being tainted by association with Freudian psychoanalysis.

The 1970s saw these old barriers erode, as social psychologists—especially symbolic interactionists of a variety of flavors—began to mine the emotional veins of self (Shott 1979), roles/identities (Burke and Reitzes 1981), situations (Heise 1977), structure (Kemper 1978), and performance/expectations (Hochschild 1979—for the sake of argument, I put Hochschild here even though she [so far as I know] nor I would really call her a symbolic interactionist). Over the course of the next few decades, the most important theoretical and empirical work explaining how and why solidarity between individuals, as well as between individuals and groups, is produced and maintained centered emotions (Collins 1988, 2004, Lawler 1992, Lawler et al. 2009, Turner 2007). These works drew from Durkheim and picked up threads of Goffman’s (1956, 1967) that “felt” more important than sometimes even Goffman let on, while often like Turner’s evolutionary work on emotions or Collin’s interaction ritual chains, borrowing from nascent brain science. But, beyond these, work in the sociology of emotions remained relatively the same as it had in the earliest innovative days while its contribution beyond the sociology of emotions was held back.

Omar and I (2020) have argued previously that one of the glaring problems is that the sociology of emotions remains rooted in the Cartesian separation of mind and body that haunts social science. Emotions are, generally speaking, treated as mediating variables—e.g., signals that one’s cognitive appraisal of a situation does not match the information received about the situation (Burke and Stets 2009, Robinson 2014)—or dependent variables—e.g., emotions are things to be managed through cognitive or linguistic work (Hochschild 1983). A third option, which also treats emotions as dependent variables, posits that relational patterns like superordinate-subordinate constrain emotions either by structural fiat (Kemper 1978) or via cultural beliefs about what incumbents in these positions should and can do (Ridgeway 2006). What if the next frontier for emotions scholarship considers emotions and affect (the sociocultural labels we learn and the neurophysiological/biological response to stimuli) as independent variables?

Some Important Facts

Studying an intrapersonal force or dynamic is not radical, as cultural sociology has largely accepted the fact that cognitive mechanisms are at the root of a theory of action (Vaisey 2009). Action is caused, at least in some way, shape, or form by cognition without doing violence to the social factors beyond the organism. Affect, however, remains on the sidelines despite several key facts.

  1. Affect, as a motivating force of motor response, is older than cognition (Panskepp 1998). Evolution appears to have worked heavily on the subcortical emotion centers in mammals to encourage both the active pursuit of life-sustaining resources and the avoidance/aversion to painful life-destroying resources. And, given the exceptionally enlarged emotional architecture in our brains (in comparison to our closest cousins, gorillas and chimps), it is plausible to suggest emotions played an outsized role in humans developing and expanding their cultural repertoire for language, kinship, social organization, and so forth. In other words, emotions have been causal, historically speaking.
  2. Undoubtedly, they are causal still today. First, the subcortical areas of the brain play an important role in memory (which is the root of a social self, for instance) (LeDoux 2000). Second, human brain imaging reveals that affect is not resigned to subcortical areas of the brain, but is actually deeply integrated with areas usually reserved for cognition (Davidson 2003). Emotions, then, can control our cognition and behavior, command it in some cases (e.g., a panic attack), and, at the very least coordinate with cognitive functions. Any theory of action that fails to account for affect is dubious is unable to realistically explain social or solitary behavior cognition (Blakemore and Vuilleumier 2017).
  3. Consequently, the vast majority of social psychological processes such as comparison, appraisal, or reflection as well as the vast majority of “causal” explanations sociologists employ like values, interests, or ideology are inextricably tied to affect. If we can no more make a decision about which toothpaste to buy without affect then we should not be surprised that comparing and choosing social objects requires affect as well.
  4. A point Lizardo and I make is that sociologists too often rely on cognitive appraisals of emotions, focusing on self-reports about valence (negative/positive), intensity, mood (longer lasting feelings), and psychologized language like loneliness. However, emotions are visceral, bodily things (Adolphs et al. 2003), and sociologists cannot only borrow from psychological research and methods on emotions.
  5. Emotions may be “social constructs” in so far as a given group of people produce and reproduce labels for different bodily feelings experienced in different situations and which carry different meanings about the (a) appropriateness of those feelings, (b) expectations for their expression or suppression, and (c) “rules” about the duration and intensity of situationally-triggered emotions. However, much of this applies to either highly institutionalized settings, like formal ceremonies (e.g., funerals), where ritual participants approach the “center” of the community and the center must be protected from moral transgression (Shils 1975) or routinized encounters where interaction itself is ritualized (Goffman 1967, Collins 2004). But the need for rules and expectations implies that affect, if left to its own devices, can wreak havoc. Moreover, it ignores the diverse array of solitary actions that consume a significant portion of our daily lives (Cohen 2015), as well as ignores the fact that emotions are often things others “use” as means of affecting others’ feelings, thoughts, and actions (Thoits 1996).

Implications

If my argument that emotion’s scholarship has largely stalled is correct, but emotions are central to individual and social life, what are we to do? Of the myriad directions one could suggest, I will emphasize four that feel most consanguine to sociological inquiry.

  1. The first suggestion picks up on a larger set of questions being raised recently by sociologists of youth and education around the largely abandoned conceptual process of socialization (Guhin et al. 2021). Once a central explanatory framework for understanding how a society “out there” could find its way inside each of us, socialization, like most bits and pieces of functionalism, was tossed out with the icky water. Prematurely, it would seem because it has not been replaced meaningfully, which has subsequently constrained a once-vibrant area of interest: child (and adolescent) development from a sociological perspective. Studying emotions and emotional socialization seems fruitful for so many reasons. For one, the rules and the patterning of emotions-behaviors is really only an adult trait. Childhood and adolescence is a period of unbridled affect, as anyone with a toddler knows well. How do we teach emotion regulation? How is this teaching process distributed across classic demographic and socioeconomic categories? How effective are social forces versus natural brain development for emotion regulation? What about teaching emotion dysregulation? Finally, the most interesting set of questions revolve around social emotions like guilt, shame, pride, and empathy (Decety and Howard 2013). At this point, sociology has ceded these culturally-coded emotions to psychological research, despite the unique methodological tools sociologists possess. For example, studying a high school’s ecosystem and status hierarchy seems an incredibly important pathway to understanding shame and pride, empathy and sympathy. Here, kids are learning, supposedly, the rules of the affectual game. Rather than reduce their experiences to DSM labels like anxiety or depression, why not expand the lens through which we view mundane and spectacular youth experiences?
  2. A second related, implication centers on what I would call emotional styles or biographies. Sociologists are familiar with these sorts of metaphors, as groups have “styles” (Eliasoph and Lichterman 2003) or biographies shaped by a collective memory. These sorts of styles or biographies shape many things like the ways parents and children interface with teachers and the educational system more generally (Lareau 2003). Research has suggested that different personality types appear to correlate with different affectual “styles,” which suggests there is something neurophysiological about doing emotions (Montag et al. 2021). My best guess is that there are social forces that play a role as well, but oddly, mainstream sociologists rarely bother to ask about emotions—likely a reflection of the ingrained Cartesian binary and not negligence on the part of social scientists.
  3. Shifting gears, a third implication builds on the dual processes models approach (Vaisey 2009, Lizardo et al. 2016) and the elephant-rider metaphor. The metaphor itself is designed to explain how implicit cultural knowledge (the elephant) is largely responsible for the direction the rider takes. Deliberate, conscious action is possible but less impactful. But, what guides the elephant? To date, the answer has largely been deeply internalized values or nondeclarative knowledge, but how do we acquire those? How does the brain sort through the variety of potential ideas, scripts, frames, or schema available? And, once internalized, how does the brain choose between different schema or knowledge? Emotions are part of the answer, as affectually tagged memories are most intensely, most readily, and quickly recalled (Catani et al. 2013). But, the rider’s level of effort in directing the elephant is no less shaped by affect. In fact, emotions appear to have a dual process related to deliberate, intentional action as well (Blakemore and Vuilleumier 2017). On the one hand, internal, affectual sensations can become associated with patterned behavior, That is, recognizable affectual sensations signals “action readiness [in order to] prepare and guide the body for action” (p. 300). On the other hand, there are preconscious motivation systems that evolved to seek positive resources and avoid their negative counterparts. A child touches a hot stove and does not need their parents to teach them never to touch that stove again. Whenever they get near a stove they will become more alert and cautious. Of course, these aversions can become pathological (and no less conscious), leading to all sorts of strange phobias and disorders. The point, however, is that emotions are causal in two different ways for the rider, which seems an important addition to the dual-process models perspective, as does the consideration of how affect coordinates, controls, and sometimes commands the so-called automatic cognition that is the elephant.
  4. The final implication speaks directly to the methodological tools we use. For the most part, emotions are measured through self-report (Stets and Carter 2012), which often conflate cognitive appraisals of emotions with emotions and affect. I would point the reader towards highly innovative efforts, like those found in Katz (1999), Collins’ (2004), and Scheff’s (1990) work, respectively. All of these use some form of ultra-micro methods that make employ audio-visual technology, careful observation, and in some cases, linguistic analyses. But, these are simply a starting point, sources of inspired analytic strategy. Ethnographic techniques are easily repurposed to include emotions and affect, as careful observation of bodily display, language, and situational cues are hallmarks of good ethnographic work (Summers-Effler 2009). Even users of quantitative methods should think more carefully about how to ask about emotions, even if that means including basic questions for the sake of explorative social science.

In short, emotions remain central to understanding and explaining how we think and act, but also remain mired in antiquated notions of mind-body, rationality-irrationality, and masculine-feminine. Moreover, old insecurities surrounding the differences between psychological and sociological social psychology—which are simply microcosms of broader insecurities writ large in sociology—have generally prohibited the conceptualization of emotions as independent, causal variables, delimiting the directions the sociology of emotion may go. The next frontier, arguably, is incorporating affective sciences into the study of emotions, and allowing brain science to speak to sociology and vice versa.

References

Abrutyn, Seth and Omar Lizardo. 2020. “Grief, Care, and Play: Theorizing the Affective Roots of the Social Self.” Advances in Group Processes 37:79-108.

Adolphs, Ralph, Daniel Tranel and Antonio R. Damasio. 2003. “Dissociable Neural Systems for Recognizing Emotions.” Brain and Cognition 52:61-69.

Blakemore, Rebekah L. and Patrik Vuilleumier. 2017. “An Emotional Call to Action: Integrating Affective Neuroscience in Models of Motor Control.” Emotion Review 9(4):299-309.

Burke, Peter J. and Donald C. Reitzes. 1981. “The Link between Identities and Role Performance.” Social Psychology Quarterly 44(2):83-92.

Burke, Peter J. and Jan E. Stets. 2009. Identity Theory. New York: Oxford University Press.

Catani, Marco, Flavio Dell’Acqua and Michel Thiebaut De Schotten. 2013. “A Revised Limbic System Model for Memory, Emotion and Behaviour.” Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews 37(8):1724-37.

Cohen, Ira J. 2015. Solitary Action: Acting on Our Own in Everyday Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Collins, Randall. 1988. “The Micro Contribution to Macro Sociology.” Sociological Theory 6(2):242-53.

—. 2004. Interaction Ritual Chains. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Damasio, Antonio. 1994. Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain. New York: Avon Books.

Davidson, Richard J. 2003. “Seven Sins in the Study of Emotion: Correctives from Affective Neuroscience.” Brain and Cognition 52:129-32.

Decety, Jean and Lauren H. Howard. 2013. “The Role of Affect in the Neurodevelopment of Morality.” Child Development Perspectives 7(1):49-54.

DiMaggio, Paul. 1997. “Culture and Cognition.” Annual Review of Sociology 23:268-87.

Eliasoph, Nina and Paul Lichterman. 2003. “Culture in Interaction.” American Journal of Sociology 108(4):735-94.

Goffman, Erving. 1956. “Embarrassment and Social Organization.” American Journal of Sociology 22(3):264-71.

—. 1967. Interaction Ritual: Essays on Face-to-Face Behavior. New York: Pantheon Books.

Guhin, Jeff, Jessica McCrory Calacro and Cynthia Miller-Idriss. 2021. “Whatever Happened to Socialization?”. Annual Review of Sociology 47:109-29.

Heise, David. 1977. “Social Action as the Control of Affect.” Behavioral Sciences 22(3):163-77.

Hochschild, Arlie. 1979. “Emotion Work, Feeling Rules, and Social Structure.” American Journal of Sociology 85(3):551-72.

—. 1983. The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Katz, Jack. 1999. How Emotions Work. Chicago: University of Chicago.

Kemper, Theodore. 1978. A Social Interactional Theory of Emotions. New York: John Wiley and Sons.

Lareau, Annette. 2003. Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Lawler, Edward J. 1992. “Affective Attachments to Nested Groups: Choice-Process Theory.” American Sociological Review 57(3):327-39.

Lawler, Edward J., Shane Thye and Jeongkoo Yoon. 2009. Social Commitments in a Depersonalized World. New York: Russell Sage.

LeDoux, Joseph. 2000. “Cognitive-Emotional Interactions: Listening to the Brain.” Pp. 129-55 in Cognitive Neuroscience of Emotion, edited by R. D. Lane and L. Nadel. New York: Oxford University Press.

Lizardo, Omar, Robert Mowry, Brandon Sepulvado, Dustin S. Stoltz, Marshall A. Taylor, Justin Van Ness and Michael Wood. 2016. “What Are Dual Process Models? Implications for Cultural Analysis in Sociology.” Sociological Theory 34(4):287-310.

Montag, Christian, Jon D. Elhai and Kenneth L. Davis. 2021. “A Comprehensive Review of Studies Using the Affective Neuroscience Personality Scales in the Psychological and Psychiatric Sciences.” Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews 125:160-67.

Panskepp, Jaak. 1998. Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Ridgeway, Cecilia L. 2006. “Expectation States Theory and Emotion.” Pp. 374-67 in Handbook of the Sociology of Emotions, edited by J. E. Stets and J. H. Turner. New York: Springer.

Robinson, Dawn, T. 2014. “The Role of Cultural Meanings and Situated Interaction in Shaping Emotion.” Emotion Review 8(3):189-95.

Scheff, Thomas. 1990. Microsociology: Discourse, Emotion and Social Structure. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Shils, Edward. 1975. “Ritual and Crisis.” Pp. 153-63 in Center and Periphery: Essays in Macrosociology, edited by E. Shils. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Shott, Susan. 1979. “Emotion and Social Life: A Symbolic Interactionist Analysis.” American Journal of Sociology 84(6):1317-34.

Stets, Jan E. and Michael J. Carter. 2012. “A Theory of the Self for the Sociology of Morality.” American Sociological Review 77(1):120-40.

Summers-Effler, Erika. 2009. Laughing Saints and Righteous Heroes. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Thoits, Peggy A. 1996. “Managing the Emotions of Others.” Symbolic Interaction 19(2):85-109.

Turner, Jonathan H. 2007. Human Emotions: A Sociological Theory. New York: Routledge.

Turner, Jonathan H. and Jan E. Stets, eds. 2006. Handbook of the Sociology of Emotions. New York: Springer.

Vaisey, Stephen. 2009. “Motivation and Justification: A Dual Process Model of Culture in Action.” American Journal of Sociology 114(+):1675-715.

 

 

Sociology’s Motivation Problem (Part II)

In a previous post, we outlined the three critical mistakes sociologists make in theorizing about motivation. We referred to them as the mono-motivational, social-psychological, and list-making fallacies. In this post, we briefly summarize each fallacy. We follow with a more extended discussion on how recent interdisciplinary work in social, cognitive, affective, and motivational neuroscience can provide new analytic tools to move the sociological theory of motivation forward while preventing falling into theoretical cul-de-sac previous work fell into. 

Mono-Motivations

The first refers to the sociological penchant to attribute a single “master” motivation to people. Sociologists and social psychologists naturally prefer that this master motivation is of the social kind and that people are primarily driven by social motivations. These range from the usual functionalist penchant to say that people are motivated to conform to the norms imposed by the society that Wrong (1963) castigated, to the Mills-inspired approach that both denies “motivations” exist as motor-springs of action, while simultaneously assuming people are motivated to produce “accounts” of their actions conforming to cultural expectations. Another version of the mono-motivational story links up to the social psychology of “need states.” In this approach, people have an “uber” motivation to “belong” to groups, form strong social ties, and the like (Baumeister and Leary 1995). A special case is “dual” motivation stories in which two “uber” motivations, one social and one anti-social, or one social and one “instrumental,” fight out for supremacy in an endless Manichean struggle (Durkheim 2005; Freud 1989; Kadushin 2002).

Drive-Reduction

The second fallacy is a more general version of this last point. This idea—central to most social and personality psychology work since the early 20th century—argues motivation can be understood as a process by which unmet needs or drives generate an unpleasant state, which people are then motivated to “reduce” or “eliminate.” This general “drive-reduction” model was first developed in behaviorist animal psychology but then generalized to the study of human motivation with the development of “control models” of human behavior after the 1950s (Carver and Scheier 1998; Heise 1977; Powers 1973). The control model imagery provides the ideal formal specification of the drive-reduction model. In this imagery, people can be thought of as “human thermostats.” A “drive” or an unmet “need” (e.g., being lonely) is a deviation from the setpoint (e.g., belongingness). Finally, human motivation is geared toward re-establishing the previous balance (finding some company)–e.g., modern affect and identity control models in social psychology (Burke and Stets 2009; Smith-Lovin and Heise 1988) are built on these foundations. Note that social-psychological control models are also mono-motivational models. They postulate a single abstract motivation (e.g., reduction of “deflection” or identity verification). Most research shows how their motivation (and method of appraising its veracity) is primary to other research programs’ motivation (Burke and Stets 1999). The social psychology behind structuration theory, ethnomethodology, and some versions of social construction, in which people are motivated to re-establish ontological security, facticity, cognitive order, and the like when threatened, also rely on the same underlying imagery (Fararo 2001). 

List-Making

Finally, we noted that multi-motivational (list) models move beyond some drawbacks of mono-motivational and drive-reduction models. The most sophisticated one, developed in sociology by Jonathan Turner (2010), poses the interplay of a multiplicity of motivations operating in every face-to-face encounter. Motivations range from the cognitive to the affective to the instrumental. However, while the multidimensional aspect of Turner’s approach is appreciated, it does inherit some weaknesses of the drive-reduction and control models that it draws upon. One problem is that the “list” of motivations, regardless of how “fundamental” the analyst thinks these are, comes from pre-existing theory, which means it is unlikely that those lists will exhaustively cover all the sources of motivated action. The lists are inherently limited and occlude both the particularity of motivation, the open-ended nature of the objects of motivation, and the situated nature of most motivated action. The other problem with Turner’s model, shared by most social-psychological models, is the assumption that people are motivated to contain or reduce abstract need states. Under this imagery, both the dynamics of motivation and the end states (usually psychological) that people pursue in motivated action are internal. The actual object people are motivated to seek drops out of the picture altogether. 

Overall, we think that the search for “fundamental” motivations, whether of the omnipotent or additive variety, is a red-herring. People are motivated by many things, and it is unlikely that this will fall into analytically neat “fundamental” types. Moreover, what is fundamental for one person, can be peripheral for another because “fundamentality” is determined by a history of learning and accumulating rewarding and non-rewarding experiences with specific objects (and by the psychological and biological potential to constitute them as rewards). Another limitation of conventional approaches is that most motivation is reactive rather than proactive. People are not motivated to act until their needs for facticity are threatened, or their identities fail to be verified, or they end up getting the short end of the deal in exchange. In a strange sense, sociologists have elevated the avoidance or, more typically, removing pain at the expense of the pursuit or enjoyment of pleasure. By relying on removing or avoiding pain and focusing on externalities only, the sociology of motivation fails the fundamental question of why one person pursues one thing and another person other things, even when faced with similar environmental prompts (Kringelbach and Berridge 2016). In short, what is missing from the social psychology of motivation is both a way to theorize the specific pursuit of particular objects, activities and events and an account of motivated action that puts motivation first — that is, in which motivated action emerges pro-actively rather than re-actively. 

Moving Beyond the Fallacies

Beyond Mono-Motivations

Moving beyond mono-motivations is the easiest. “Typing” motivations at an abstract level does not get us very far in this endeavor (Martin and Lembo 2020), so the best fix is just to acknowledge both the diversity and the specificity of motivators, so we don’t fall into the penchant to say that people are motivated to pursue psychological abstractions (like “ontological security” or “belongingness”), let alone a single one of these. Put differently, people are motivated to pursue a multiplicity of objects and lines of action, and the candidate “motivators” are massively diverse. Some are social, some are pro-social, some are anti-social, some are egoistic, others altruistic, and, yes, some are psychological. A good rule of thumb is that if you cannot tell us what people are motivated by — where “what” has to be a concrete object, event, or experience (e.g., that I get tenure) — then you need to move down the “ladder of abstraction” and tell us precisely what you think people are pursuing (Sartori 1984).

The same goes for the crypto-mono-motivational approach inspired by Mills, where people are master-motivated to produce “accounts” of their actions. Sometimes people may be motivated to do this; other times, they are not. The essential analytic point is that we need to separate motive or motivation talk from motivation proper. To foreshadow, motivation has everything to do with objects and rewards and nothing to do with justifications. This is not difficult to imagine. In quantitative research, in particular, but also retrospective and historical qualitative research, motive talk may be the only data available. Understanding the normative frames or motivation schemata actors use to interpret their behavior remains a relevant and essential subject of study (Franzese 2013; Hewitt 2013). Nevertheless, we should not assume post hoc accounts are causal or even verge on tapping into causally relevant factors. 

Beyond Drive-Reduction

However, we have seen that you can conquer the mono-motivational monster while remaining trapped by the constraint of the dominant model of motivation in social psychology — the drive to reduce discomfort, pain, and the like. For instance, if I think meaning maintenance is such a need, when people experience hard to interpret events (e.g., a mother killing her child), then I can posit that they are motivated to reduce the uncomfortable state of deflection this event has produced. There is no question that some motivational processes are of this (reactive) sort. However, taking this as the paradigm for motivation is an analytic mistake. Most motivated action is the proactive pursuit of specific objects, events, persons, or states of affairs; it is, by definition, intentional, guided, and controlled (Miller Tate 2019). The initiation of motivated action need-not (and usually is not) preceded by a “need” state. Instead, it is preceded by an event that activates a memory of the desired object. Later, by a plan (which could also be stored in long-term memory as a habit if repeatedly rehearsed before) that provides a flexible behavioral template for the person to pursue it. 

But what makes objects desired or desirable? This is a question for which contemporary motivational neuroscience’s answer is deceptively simple, but, we think, extraordinarily generative. Objects become the object of motivation when they are constituted as rewards (Schroeder, 2004). Objects are constituted as rewards when, after seeking them out, they lead to satisfying (e.g., pleasurable) experiences in a given context. This is followed by a learning process (reinforcement) in which we bind the experienced qualities of the object to the pleasurable experience while also storing for future use the extent to which the positive experience matches, exceeds, or falls short of the pleasure we predicted we were going to get (where “prediction” can be both implicit or explicit). In this way, objects go, via repeated travels through this cycle, from being “neutral” (non-motivating) to being capable of triggering motivated action (we start “wanting” the object spontaneously or without much effort). 

An object with the capacity to lead to motivated action following positive consummatory experiences is thus constituted (construed, categorized) as a reward in future encounters so that the object begins to function as a salient incentive. We can then speak of the object as being represented (by that person) as a reward, with reward-representations leading to motivated action once they are activated (either by the environment or by the person) on future occasions (Schroeder 2004; Winkielman and Berridge 2003). 

The basic lesson here is that only objects constituted as rewards have the causal power to energize action. Abstract “need-states,” uncomfortable drives, experiences of “deflection,” or “lack of meaning,” “ennui,” “ontological (in)security,” or “loneliness,” are not objects. Therefore, they cannot be constituted as rewards. By implication, they cannot count as causes energizing people to act. However, an apple, a glass of water, a beer, hanging out with your best friend, molly, reaching the solution to a challenging crossword puzzle, publishing a paper, getting released from prison, earning praise from your advisor, cocaine, getting a bunch of Twitter likes, and a zillion others (the list is open-ended) are objects (e.g., they are either things or events). Therefore, they can all be constituted—under the right circumstances, by particular people—as rewards. By implication, they count as causes that energize people to act. 

If you are still mourning the death of homeostatic or drive reduction theories of motivation, think of the last time you stuffed yourself with chocolate lava cake after a hearty dinner. You sure weren’t hungry any longer (thus, there was no “drive” to “reduce”). You probably were beyond your set point for satiation (so the “error” was probably going in the wrong direction. However, you still ate the cake because you either had looked forward to dessert from the start, the cake itself looked delicious; or, even more likely, you might have eaten the cake although the “hedonic impact” (the pleasure experience) was actually much more muted than you thought. All rewards (psychological, social, and the like) work like that (Berridge 2004, 2018). 

Beyond Fundamental Motives

 From the perspective of modern motivational science, we can think of standard fundamental motivation theories as incompletely articulated models of motivation. Thus, people are not motivated to attain abstract states (e.g., trust or predictability) qua external states. The hidden scope condition here is that as long as trust and predictability lead to psychologically rewarding objects, people will be motivated to try to organize their external environment such that those states obtain. Making explicit this scope condition also shows the futility of delving for “universal” motives of this kind. Thus, it is fair to suggest people will be motivated to try to live in trusting and predictable worlds, but there is nothing necessary about this; if trust and predictability fail to be psychologically rewarding, then people will not be motivated to pursue these external conditions. 

For instance, people high on the personality trait usually labeled “openness to experience,” find (moderately) unpredictable environments psychologically rewarding and overly predictable environments non-rewarding. As such, these people will be driven to pursue lines of action that do not conform to the idea of “ontological security” as a general motivator. Jumping from planes, hanging out with grizzly bears, or diving around lethal ocean life, none of which are conducive to ontological (or physical) security, can be constituted as rewards by some people. In that case, people will be motivated to seek out these lines of action. The analytic mistake here is to think of the (usually) rewarding line of action as the “motivation,” when in fact it is the (contingent, not necessary) link between the external state and the internal reward (the real motivator) that makes the former a condition to be striven for. 

In the same way, it is essential to not assume that just because something “sounds good,” from the armchair, that it will be a universal motivator. Take, for instance, the oft-discussed case of “belongingness.” It might seem redundant and unnecessary to specify that social ties or group belonging can be constituted as psychological rewards (Baumeister and Leary 1995; Kadushin 2002). But if the full extent of human variation is considered, it is easy to see that they may not be. For instance, recent work in the neuropsychology of autism and the autism-spectrum shows (Carré et al. 2015; Supekar et al. 2018) there is a portion (how large remains unclear) of the population for whom interpersonal relations are either less rewarding or non-rewarding (compared to tangible rewards (Gale, Eikeseth, and Klintwall 2019)), and a smaller proportion for whom they might actually be aversive (so it is the avoidance or cessation of belonging or connection that actually counts as a reward). Interpersonal relationships are generally rewarding for “neurotypical” people because a (developmental, genetic, epigenetic) mechanism has made them so. If this mechanism is either disrupted by, for instance, brain injury or the onset of mental illness (or is non-existent from early on during development as with autistic individuals), then belongingness ceases to be a “fundamental” motivation. 

Throwing Out the Lists

In this last respect, many of the criticisms of fundamental motivations apply to the list-makers. Because of the contingent link between external state (e.g., trust, security, belonging) and reward, it is unlikely that any of the other so-called “fundamental motivations,” that have been proposed in psychology and sociology (e.g., need for “power,” “influence,” “status,” “altruism,” “trust,” and the like) by people who like to write down “lists” of motives are fundamental. This is especially the case for “fundamental” motives theorized as “needs for” some concrete state of affairs. Thus, all of these candidate motives will fail Baumeister and Leary’s criterion of being “universal in the sense of applying to all people” (p. 498). Instead, most of the motives appearing in these sorts of lists and proposals can be best thought of as states, processes, and external conditions commonly (in the probabilistic sense) linked to objects typically constituted as rewards and thus likely to be pursued by most (but not all) people. Diversity, both in terms of “neurodiversity” and diversity of experience and learning history, and institutional location and historical context is the rule rather than the exception. 

Turner’s (2010) list inherits this weakness. Still, it stands out because it does not seek an exhaustive list of drives we have—mostly because he accepts the underlying homeostatic control model seeing a finite number of needs being salient in micro-interaction and because he does not prioritize the items on the list. On the one hand, this is commendable. It adds flexibility to the social scientist: we could add more things to the list as identity verification, trust, facticity, reciprocal fairness, and belongingness are not the only things that might matter. Furthermore, this flexibility does not negate the utility of his list because he does locate the motivational forces, even if he does not specify their neurobiological foundations, inside our heads and bodies. On the other hand, because Turner’s list seeks to contextualize psychological needs within a larger constellation of nested social spaces, it cannot explain a wide array of behaviors that fall outside the interaction or encounter unit in which his microsociology situates itself. Drug or food addiction goes unexplained, as do situations between two or more people who are not motivated by, say, trust, but get along just fine, and so does the ability to make sense of why some scientists pursue celebrity status at all costs while others operate within the rules of their professional field.

From Fundamental “Motivations” to Fundamental Motivational Processes

Ultimately, lists or not, drive-states or not, the fundamental weakness in sociological theories of motivation is the omission of reward and, importantly, the neurophysiological connections between reward/object/schema work. This is perhaps the most controversial thing we can posit to sociologists, given their aversion to intrapersonal dynamics and to any hint at reductionism. But, despite our best efforts to resist over-psychologization and over-economization, sociology’s candidates for motivation continue to psychologize and economize (and, worse, oversocialize), but with very little connection to empirical research on the mechanics of motivation or reflective thought on what, why, and how people are actually compelled to do things. Rewards, then, are central to the explanatory story (Kringelbach and Berridge 2016). Controversial as it may be, it is the best path forward for exercising sociology of the (explicit and implicit) vestiges of a long-standing and venerable tradition, in which analysts sit at their desks trying to come up with the one, or for more modest cogitators, the definitive top list of, motivation and motivations, respectively. Incorporating control-theoretic versions of early twentieth-century homeostatic models or philosophical speculation about “ontological security” did not help matters in this particular regard.

Luckily for us, contemporary work in affective, cognitive, and motivational neuroscience (and increasingly the overlap of these fields with social neuroscience and social and personality psychology) suggests a fundamental theoretical reorientation in the way we think of motivation in broader social and human sciences. Thus, instead of “fundamental motivations,” we propose that the focus should move to the study of fundamental motivational processes, with the understanding that there is a massive (perhaps non-enumerable) set of objects that could count as “motivators.” 

What are these processes? In the earlier discussion, we have made reference to a few of them. Note, for instance, that in the cycle leading objects to be constituted as rewards, there is a seeking phase where we engage in (flexible—either habitual or intentional) motivated activity to attain the object and a consummatory phase—where we enjoy the object. There is also a post-consummation (or satiatory) phase, where we store linkages between the pleasure experienced (if any) to update the “reward status” of the object and where we compare what we thought we were going to get to what we got. Using folk psychological labels for these phases of motivation, we can say that the fundamental motivational processes leading objects to be constituted as rewards are wanting (seeking), liking, and learning. Thus, pleasure is an aspect or “phase” (to use Dewey’s locution) of motivated action, not the whole of it. 

In short, it is this cycle (and, as we will see in a follow-up post, each phase’s neurobiological dissociability), our ability to anticipate — right or wrongly — rewarding experiences with an object (or set of similarly classed objects), and the actual reward itself that constitutes a theory of motivation or motivational processes. Any object can come to intentionally guide and control our motor impulses or become a source of habitually motivated activity. In a follow-up post, we will discuss these fundamental motivational processes, how they are linked together—and most importantly, how they come apart—and the more significant implications the reward-focused approach has for the study of motivated action in institutional settings. 

References

Baumeister, R. F., and M. R. Leary. 1995. “The Need to Belong: Desire for Interpersonal Attachments as a Fundamental Human Motivation.” Psychological Bulletin 117(3):497–529.

Berridge, Kent C. 2004. “Motivation Concepts in Behavioral Neuroscience.” Physiology & Behavior 81(2):179–209.

Berridge, Kent C. 2018. “Evolving Concepts of Emotion and Motivation.” Frontiers in Psychology 9:1647.

Burke, Peter J., and Jan E. Stets. 1999. “Trust and Commitment through Self-Verification.” Social Psychology Quarterly 62(4):347–66.

Burke, Peter J., and Jan E. Stets. 2009. Identity Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Carré, Arnaud, Coralie Chevallier, Laurence Robel, Caroline Barry, Anne-Solène Maria, Lydia Pouga, Anne Philippe, François Pinabel, and Sylvie Berthoz. 2015. “Tracking Social Motivation Systems Deficits: The Affective Neuroscience View of Autism.” Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders 45(10):3351–63.

Carver, Charles S., and Michael F. Scheier. 1998. On the Self-Regulation of Behavior. Cambridge University Press.

Durkheim, Emile. 2005. “The Dualism of Human Nature and Its Social Conditions.” Durkheimian Studies 11(1). doi: 10.3167/175223005783472211.

Fararo, Thomas J. 2001. Social Action Systems: Foundation and Synthesis in Sociological Theory. Greenwood Publishing Group.

Franzese, Alexis T. 2013. “Motivation, Motives, and Individual Agency.” Pp. 281–318 in Handbook of Social Psychology, edited by J. DeLamater and A. Ward. Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands.

Freud, Sigmund. 1989. The Ego and the Id. WW Norton & Company.

Gale, Catherine M., Svein Eikeseth, and Lars Klintwall. 2019. “Children with Autism Show Atypical Preference for Non-Social Stimuli.” Scientific Reports 9(1):10355.

Heise, David R. 1977. “Social Action as the Control of Affect.” Systems Research: The Official Journal of the International Federation for Systems Research 22(3):163–77.

Hewitt, John P. 2013. “Dramaturgy and Motivation: Motive Talk, Accounts, and Disclaimers.” Pp. 109–36 in The Drama of Social Life: A Dramaturgical Handbook, edited by C. Edgley. New York: Routledge.

Kadushin, Charles. 2002. “The Motivational Foundation of Social Networks.” Social Networks 24(1):77–91.

Kringelbach, Morten L., and Kent C. Berridge. 2016. “Neuroscience of Reward, Motivation, and Drive.” Pp. 23–35 in Recent Developments in Neuroscience Research on Human Motivation. Vol. 19, Advances in Motivation and Achievement. Emerald Group Publishing Limited.

Martin, John Levi, and Alessandra Lembo. 2020. “On the Other Side of Values.” The American Journal of Sociology 126(1):52–98.

Miller Tate, Alex James. 2019. “A Predictive Processing Theory of Motivation.” Synthese. doi: 10.1007/s11229-019-02354-y.

Powers, William Treval. 1973. Behavior: The Control of Perception. Aldine Publishing Company.

Sartori, Giovanni. 1984. “Guidelines for Concept Analysis.” Pp. 15–85 in Social Science Concepts: A Systematic Analysis, edited by G. Sartori. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage.

Schroeder, Timothy. 2004. Three Faces of Desire. Oxford University Press.

Smith-Lovin, Lynn, and David R. Heise. 1988. Analyzing Social Interaction: Advances in Affect Control Theory. Taylor & Francis.

Supekar, Kaustubh, John Kochalka, Marie Schaer, Holly Wakeman, Shaozheng Qin, Aarthi Padmanabhan, and Vinod Menon. 2018. “Deficits in Mesolimbic Reward Pathway Underlie Social Interaction Impairments in Children with Autism.” Brain: A Journal of Neurology 141(9):2795–2805.

Turner, Jonathan H. 2010. “Motivational Dynamics in Encounters.” P. ` in Theoretical Principles of Sociology, Volume 2: Microdynamics, edited by J. H. Turner. New York, NY: Springer New York.

Winkielman, Piotr, and Kent Berridge. 2003. “Irrational Wanting and Subrational Liking: How Rudimentary Motivational and Affective Processes Shape Preferences and Choices.” Political Psychology 24(4):657–80.

Wrong, Dennis H. 1963. “Human Nature and the Perspective of Sociology.” Social Research 30(3):300–318.

 

Sociology’s Motivation Problem (Part I)

Sociology has an action problem. Explaining social action rests at the core of sociological inquiry. However, at best, the typical explanatory mechanisms focus almost exclusively on two of Mead’s three aspects of the self: the generalized other and the me. Six decades after Dennis Wrong’s (1962, 1963) critique of mid-twentieth-century sociology, its grasp over Mead’s I remains tenuous, at best. In this particular respect, sociology has a motivation problem, as noted by others before (Campbell, 1996; J. H. Turner, 2010). This problem can be traced to two sources.

On the one hand, there is the undue influence of a paper by C. Wright Mills (1940) on vocabulary of motives (Campbell, 1996). On the other hand, there is sociology’s deep-seated fear of over-psychologizing or over-economizing human action (J. H. Turner, 2010). Consequently, sociological solutions to its motivation problem remain on the wrong side of Wrong’s oversocialized critique. Instead of “forces mobilizing, driving, and energizing individuals to act…” (J. H. Turner, 1987, p. 15), we are left either with explanations relying on distal, external forces, like values/norms (Inglehart & Baker, 2000; Schwartz, 2012), or exogenously specified interests/goals (Coleman, 1990). As critics of both normativist and utilitarian approaches note (Martin & Lembo, 2020; Whitford, 2002), the effects, internalization, and patterning of values and interests are mysterious at best and rob individuals of agency at worst. Ultimately, appeal to values and interests as core motivational states to answer the fundamental question of why people “want what they want” falls short of explaining action.

So, what is motivation? We argue that an answer to the question of motivation cannot be obtained by drawing on any single discipline’s intellectual resources. Instead, an interdisciplinary approach is required. Ideally, such an approach would combine the strengths of sociology, psychology, cognitive science, and the emerging fields of affective and motivational neuroscience. Ideally, this would (and, we think, can) be done without sounding the reductionist alarm bells, especially regarding psychology and neuroscience. However, before getting to this, we have to put to bed the Millsian shadow that has distanced sociology’s usage of motivation from every other social and behavioral science, and then consider the potential best candidates for a sociology of motivation.

Motives, Justifications, and Motivation, Oh My!

In his critique of the subjective “springs of action,” Mills (1940) committed sociology to the search for and study of “typical vocabularies having ascertainable functions in delimited societal situations [that] actors do vocalize and impute motives to themselves and to others” (904). Notably, these motives were not in “an individual” but were instead conceived as the “[t]erms with which interpretation of conduct by social actors proceeds.” This theoretical move, celebrated as it may be (e.g., Hewitt, 2013), removed the possibility of considering intrapersonal forces of any sort in theorizing motivation, even in social situations (J. H. Turner, 2010). It has also led to various (unnecessary) mental gymnastics sociologists routinely put themselves through as they seek to recover or reinvent ideas that have well-established, shared meanings in other fields, resulting in the creation of a sociological idiolect that is hard to translate into the lingua franca of the broader social and behavioral sciences (Vaisey & Valentino, 2017). For instance, Martin (2011) proposes a neologism (“impulsion”) to refer to good old-fashioned motivation (internal forces compelling people to act), given the monolithic disciplinary understanding of motivation as a set of stereotyped vocabularies. It also made conceptual confusion surrounding the difference between a motivational process or motivating force and motive talk and justifications (or what Scott and Lyman (1968) eventually called accounts).

Thus, sociologists face a difficult decision. On the one hand, they can risk internal disciplinary criticism for “over-psychologizing” action and examine internal motivational processes or the meanings actors use across different contexts for organizing actions. This is what social psychologists call motives (Perinbanayagam, 1977) and what Mills criticized as subjective springs of social action. On the other hand, they can hew closely to current disciplinary circumscriptions and restrict their studies to post hoc rationales that may or may not be connected to the actual motivation or motive, but what Mills did call a motive (Franzese, 2013). Ultimately, in place of causes of action, the emphasis shifted to post hoc “motivation talk” or accounts (Hewitt, 2013; Scott & Lyman, 1968), restricting the sociology of motivation to the search for and recording of creative post hoc reconstructions (and thus likely to be confabulations not necessarily tied to the causes of action) that attempt to tell a normative appropriate or culturally stereotyped story about “the reasons” why people engage in this or that line of action (Campbell, 1996; Martin, 2011, p. 311ff).

We can trace the pervasive disciplinary influence of Mills’s argument, in part, sociology’s unwitting adherence to the Durkheimian vision of homo duplex (Durkheim, 2005). Under this framework, in its most naïve form, psychological processes are beyond the sociological bailiwick. In its most vulgar form, psychology is unnecessary as explanans because sociological explananda are sui generis (Durkheim, 1895/1982). This unnecessarily lingering barrier keeping psychology and related behavioral sciences at bay prevents sociology from explaining how and why people are motivated to act—a theoretical puzzle resting at the discipline’s foundations. Instead of explicitly theorizing intrapersonal processes, we find implicit sociological versions of psychology working hard to locate motivational forces, like pressures to conform or belongingness, outside the individual. And, yet, like Mills’ own formulation, these efforts always run afoul of Wrong’s (1963) critique in so far as these external causal forces of action must be internalized somehow. This leads to an image of people as marionettes whose strings are pulled by some sort of oversocialized ideological force like neoliberalism or patriarchy or their motive mechanisms like pressure to conform.

In the process of picking one’s favorite ideological force or motive mechanism, those adhering to Mills or Parsons or any externalist commits the more critical error of which we call the mono-motivational fallacy. Central to Wrong’s critique of functionalism was its strict adherence to a single causal force: the need or pressure to conform to normative expectations. A pressure rooted in socialization or enculturation and through alchemy imposes a collective conscience on the individual conscience. Pressure to conform, however, is not the only mono-motivational engine of action. Any external explanation—such as situations or situational vocabularies, networks, and influence—that has a predominant effect on human behavior requires analysts to implicitly or explicitly postulate an overarching “meta-motivation” (Maslow, 1967) to all people: To conform or follow the external prescriptions, normative pressures, and so forth provided by society (Wrong, 1961, 1963).

This fallacy is amplified when distal or exogenous causes, like values or interests, are introduced into the explanation. Asking individuals, after the fact, may “tap” into shared beliefs but in no way allow us to explain why or how someone did what they did. This is a dilemma most pronounced when we consider, for instance, the panoply of a-social or “anti-social” motivations that observers of human behavior from Plato to Freud have described (Wrong, 1963). Luckily, there are sociological alternatives or candidates for a more empirically sound theory of motivation. The first set of alternatives can be found in microsociology and sociological social psychology.

Human Thermostats

A large body of social psychology relies on the notion of homeostasis or, more commonly, control models (Powers, 1973). Like a house thermostat, input comes in from the environment about our identity performance, situational alignment of expected meanings and actual meanings, justice and fairness, or whatever is the need-state du jour. Whenever there is an error or discrepancy between the internal “set” state and the current environmental feedback, we are motivated to return the thermostat to its original setting. In part, this mechanistic view draws inspiration from Dewey’s and Mead’s pragmatism, identifying a mechanism operating in place of pragmatist ideas about problems, problem-situations and sifting through different action possibilities to resolve those problems. But, the control-theoretic approach also over-relies on cognitive appraisals, which suggests, like Mills’ vocabulary of motives, an internalization process sensitive to external pressures keyed to maintaining the (societally) preset “temperature.” After all, someone must set the thermostat; in sociology, that someone is the generalized other. It also relies on, implicitly, an early twentieth-century model of motivation that emerged in physiology (Cannon, 1932), psychology (Hull, 1937), and, especially, psychoanalysis: drive reduction (where the drive is to reduce the discomfort produced by the mismatch between current feedback and internalized expectations). And yet, sociological applications of control theories work hard to obscure the underlying psychological mechanism.

Other possible candidates, however, make these mechanisms explicit. For example, in a naturalist version of utilitarianism, due to Bentham, in its most vulgar form, all action can be explained by the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain. Some versions of “sociological rational choice theory” borrow this implicit driver but layer various external constraints, tradeoffs, and exchange interdependencies in the pursuit of interests. So, people are driven to realize their interests by pursuing goals, but collectives shape these goals through joint task inseparability, incurring costs for access to collective goods and the like (Coleman, 1990). Likewise, role theory relies upon, at least partially, internal commitment to roles for which actors anticipate being rewarded in the future (Turner 1978) and avoidance of roles punished or sanctioned by institutional authorities (Goffman 1959).

The same can be said for two other quintessential social-psychological motivations: belongingness (Baumeister & Leary, 1995) and ontological security (Giddens, 1984). The former presumes that a fundamental meta-motivation of all social behavior, both expressive and suppressive, is driven by the evolved need to belong to social groups and attachment to other people and collectives. A social psychological form of functionalism, admittedly, this tradition shifts from distal causes (values and external pressures) to proximate causes (evolved needs present at birth). Similarly, a host of sociological traditions, ranging from phenomenology, ethnomethodology, structuration theory, expectation states theory, and role theory, rely on an evolved need for cognitive order, facticity, and predictability (and, relatedly, trust). From these perspectives, people are motivated to assume the world is as it seems to be and actively sustain this belief through consistent, predictable, and stable action. The horrors of anomie or the collapse of plausibility structures, as Berger (1969) defined it, is too great an internal force to not motivate us to act in the positive (by conforming) and in the negative (by avoiding upsetting the moral order).

Despite the temptation of more explicitly delineated psychological mechanisms, these three possible candidates, along with control theories, rely too heavily on implicit (and sometimes explicit) drive and need-state reduction conceptions of motivation, which in turn fancies mono-motivations (to belong, facticity, cognitive order, and the like). They also depend solely on external factors to specify motivational dynamics. For example, belongingness is impossible without a social object to which one belongs. That is, motivation remains external because the things we want or the things that compel us to act have to be beyond our body and brain.

Multi-Motivational Models

Jonathan Turner’s (1987, 2010) work on the motivational dynamics of encounters seems well-poised to deal with the two limitations of need-state and drive reduction models in sociology, namely, their penchant for devolving into mono-motivational accounts and their sole focus on external drives. Turner’s work is synthetic and directed towards explaining how the basic unit of social analysis—the encounter, situation, or interaction depending on one’s persuasion—is built up. The argument is that social psychologists, usually of the “control-model variety” described above, have isolated slivers of a larger microsociological dynamic. However, these pieces need to be combined to get a more robust vision of what sorts of motivational or transactional forces driving micro-level action and interaction. Turner’s criterion for defining motivation is simple: “persistent needs that [people] seek to meet in virtually all encounters, especially focused encounters” (193). Unmet needs generate negative emotions that lead actors to leave the encounter or sanction those who have thwarted their efforts. In contrast, met needs produce positive affect, help maintain the encounter, and leave the actor with a desire to interact again in the future. Turner’s list includes the following five need-states: (1) identity verification, (2) a sense of fairness and justice in exchanges, (3) group inclusion, (4) trust, and (5) facticity. He conceptualizes them as additive, with encounters being possible when one or two of them are met but unlikely to be as satisfying or encouraging of recurrence when they are not met.

Turner’s model achieves two important analytic goals. First, it comes as close to a biopsychological model as any sociologist we are aware of. Second, it locates an explanation for social processes within the individual. In his larger theoretical framework of micro-level dynamics, Turner sees role, status, emotion, and culture “making” as emerging from the combination of these needs. Roles, for instance, emerge from persistent efforts to verify identity–consistency in performance–and ensure facticity and trust–predictability (see R. Turner 1978). But, of course, once roles are created, they become emergent, distinct properties that simplify meeting needs as people take pre-set roles (in addition to statuses, emotions, and culture). Motivation, then, is shaped by the social environment; creative efforts to alter a single encounter or a larger structural-cultural unit like the group, and patterned by the crystallization of certain “vehicles” of structure and culture. Consequently, neither the intra nor interpersonal is reduced in Turner’s model to a meta-motivational need, nor does it succumb to a drive reduction model.

Turner’s model, however, is not without limitations despite its important advances. First, even when the author qualifies them by arguing theirs is not exhaustive, need-state lists are delimiting. They naturally ignore the open-ended nature of desire and, more broadly, the idea of desire itself (Schroeder, 2004). It is not that social life is free of pressure to conform to roles, but even Ralph Turner (1976) labored to show action was often “impulsive.” This was a poorly chosen term, meaning that many situations afforded people the freedom to do many things that can only be explained by thinking about desire. A second problem derives from the first: because lists are incomplete, one could add goals ad infinitum, eventually running into problems like contradictory goals or ideological commitments of the list-maker. Finally, D’Andrade (1992) reminds us that motivations are generally situationally bound: though humans are social creatures reasonably constrained by the scaffolding erected by social institutions and our habits, the truth of the matter is (a) we all tend to respond to the immediate situation, (b) our choice to pursue certain situations, even those that are unhealthy, are rooted as much in neurophysiology as some abstract construct like a role, and (c) many objects that are anticipated, consumed, and reinforced after satiation is inside our bodies (food/sex; belongingness; domination) and, yet, sociologically relevant (Kringelbach & Berridge, 2016). Like all delimiting devices (e.g., the Classical Theory canon), lists are arbitrary, and arbitrary lists are flawed road maps for explaining action.

In a follow-up post, we will tackle the fixes to these three critical mistakes—the mono-motivational, social-psychological, and list-making fallacies.

References

Baumeister, R. F., & Leary, M. R. (1995). The need to belong: desire for interpersonal attachments as a fundamental human motivation. Psychological Bulletin, 117(3), 497–529.

Berger, P. L. (1969). The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion. Doubleday.

Campbell, C. (1996). On the concept of motive in sociology. Sociology, 30(1), 101–114.

Cannon, W. B. (1932). The wisdom of the body. Norton.

Coleman, J. C. (1990). Foundations of Social Theory. Harvard University Press.

D’Andrade, R. G. (1992). Schemas and motivation. In R. G. D’Andrade & C. Strauss (Eds.), Human motives and cultural models. (pp. 23–44). Cambridge University Press.

Durkheim, E. (1982). Rules of Sociological Method (S. Lukes (ed.); W. D. Halls, trans.). The Free Press. (Original work published 1895)

Durkheim, E. (2005). The dualism of human nature and its social conditions. Durkheimian Studies, 11(1). https://doi.org/10.3167/175223005783472211

Franzese, A. T. (2013). Motivation, Motives, and Individual Agency. In J. DeLamater & A. Ward (Eds.), Handbook of Social Psychology (pp. 281–318). Springer Netherlands.

Giddens, A. (1984). The constitution of society: Outline of the theory of structuration. Univ of California Press.

Hewitt, J. P. (2013). Dramaturgy and motivation: Motive talk, accounts, and disclaimers. In C. Edgley (Ed.), The Drama of Social Life: A Dramaturgical Handbook (pp. 109–136). Routledge.

Hull, C. L. (1937). Mind, mechanism, and adaptive behavior. Psychological Review, 44(1), 1.

Inglehart, R., & Baker, W. E. (2000). Modernization, Cultural Change, and the Persistence of Traditional Values. American Sociological Review, 65(1), 19–51.

Kringelbach, M. L., & Berridge, K. C. (2016). Neuroscience of Reward, Motivation, and Drive. In Recent Developments in Neuroscience Research on Human Motivation (Vol. 19, pp. 23–35). Emerald Group Publishing Limited.

Martin, J. L. (2011). The explanation of social action. Oxford University Press.

Martin, J. L., & Lembo, A. (2020). On the Other Side of Values. The American Journal of Sociology, 126(1), 52–98.

Maslow, A. (1967). Atheory of metamotivation: The biological rooting of the value-life. Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 7, 93–127.

Mills, C. W. (1940). Situated Actions and Vocabularies of Motive. American Sociological Review, 5(6), 904–913.

Perinbanayagam, R. S. (1977). The structure of motives. Symbolic Interaction, 1(1), 104–120.

Powers, W. T. (1973). Behavior: the Control of Perception. Aldine Publishing Company.

Schroeder, T. (2004). Three Faces of Desire. Oxford University Press.

Schwartz, S. H. (2012). An Overview of the Schwartz Theory of Basic Values. Online Readings in Psychology and Culture, 2(1), 11.

Scott, M. B., & Lyman, S. M. (1968). Accounts. American Sociological Review, 33(1), 46–62.

Turner, J. H. (1987). Toward a Sociological Theory of Motivation. American Sociological Review, 52(1), 15–27.

Turner, J. H. (2010). Motivational Dynamics in Encounters. In J. H. Turner (Ed.), Theoretical Principles of Sociology, Volume 2: Microdynamics (pp. 193–235). Springer New York.

Turner, R. H. (1976). The real self: from institution to impulse. AJS; American Journal of Sociology, 81(5), 989–1016.

Vaisey, S., & Valentino, L. (2017). Culture and Choice: Toward Integrating Cultural Sociology with the Judgment and Decision-Making Sciences. Poetics, 68 , 131–143.

Whitford, J. (2002). Pragmatism and the untenable dualism of means and ends: Why rational choice theory does not deserve paradigmatic privilege. Theory and Society, 31(3), 325–363.

Wrong, D. H. (1961). The Oversocialized Conception of Man in Modern Sociology. American Sociological Review, 26(2), 183–193.

Wrong, D. H. (1963). Human nature and the perspective of sociology. Social Research, 30(3), 300–318.

 

 

Image Source: Vantage Circle
Image Source: Vantage Circle

Can Schemas Motivate?

In an influential paper entitled “Schemas and Motivation,” the cognitive anthropologist Roy D’Andrade once remarked on the curious lack of relation (with reference to anthropological theory)

…between culture and action. Of course, one can say ‘people do what they do because their culture makes them do it.’ The problem with this formulation is that it does not explain anything. Do people always do what their culture tells them to? If they do, why do they? If they don’t, why don’t they? And how does culture make them do it? Unless there is some specification of how culture ‘makes’ people do what they do, no explanation has been given (1992: 23).

D’Andrade’s overall observation, namely, that cultural theory is not worth its salt unless it tells us how culture links to action, is important and worth making, as I noted in a previous post. As social scientists, we care about culture to the extent that it helps us explain what people do. In the same way, D’Andrade’s dismissal of the “naive” or unqualified version of the “culture causes action” (CCA) thesis is on the right track. In its unqualified form, CCA is explanatorily vacuous because it is completely unconstrained and does not specify the mechanisms via which such causal effects are supposed to happen.

D’Andrade notes that the “explanatory gap” he points to is particularly salient when it comes to trying to explain why people put effort and striving in engaging in some lines of action at the expense of others. For D’Andrade, there is a “standard account” that posits that culture helps in action selection (and persistence) because culture helps to motivate people to pursue one line of activity over others. But it

…remains unclear how culture is connected to motivational strivings. Without an account of the relation between culture and motivation, we may have an intuitive sense that there are culturally based strivings, but we have no explanation of this (1992: 23).

D’Andrade observes that to link culture and motivation, we must clarify what we mean by motivation. He proposes a quick and dirty definition based on the usual “folk” understanding. For D’Andrade, “motivation is experienced as a desire or wish, followed by a feeling of satisfaction if the desire is fulfilled.” Thus, motivation is intimately linked to the folk category of desire (as more recently argued by Schroeder 2004). Motivation also has to do with internal processes that “energize” or activate people to act in a given setting (as more recently argued by Turner 2010); “[a]long with this increase in activity there is is typically a striving for something—a goal directedness in behavior” (24).

Thus, motivation is the persistent, energized pursuit of goals, where the latter pertains to the fulfillment of desires. D’Andrade goes on to review models of motivation that were prominent in mid-twentieth century psychological science, namely, those conceptualizing motivation in terms of “drive reduction” (e.g., satiation of hunger, thirst, and the like) and those conceptualizing motivation in terms of “need-fulfullment” where the “needs” concern usually very long (or open-ended) lists of abstract things, states, or relations people might desire to pursue (e.g., achievement, autonomy, affiliation, order, dominance, and the like).

D’Andrade profers three (correct) critiques of such models.

  • First, a “list of motives” approach is incapable of capturing the open-ended nature of human desire (Schroeder 2004). Essentially, there is nothing that cannot be conceptualized as a “need,” which means that analysts will be forced to include all kinds of heterogeneous, incompatible, and contradictory goals (e.g., needs for “abasement,” and “enhancement”) into any presumably exhaustive (but largely unstructured) list. Both arbitrariness and the lack of structure make these lists suspect.
  • Second, motive lists will always be incomplete. Such lists will be necessarily partial and tilted towards the “needs” or strivings that make sense to WEIRD populations. They will necessarily lack cross-cultural (or even historical) coverage and thus will be powerless to account for the full observed empirical variation of motives and motivations exhibited by people.
  • Third, there are very few “trans-situational” motives. Most motivations are contextually specific; they are inclinations or dispositions to pursue particular goals in particular settings. That is why lists of motives end up degenerating into lists of personality-like traits. Saying someone has a trans-situational “need for dominance” is no different from saying that they will be aggressive in all or most settings. But as modern personality research shows (Cervone 2005), there are few (or no) trans-situational personality traits, needs, or strivings. List of motives approaches cannot capture the “situated” nature of human motivation.

D’Andrade also points to the difficulty of measuring motives (a problem shared by all theories of motives). At one point, analysts inspired by the list of motives approach relied on discredited instruments taken from psychodynamic theories (e.g., inkblot tests). Today, the workhorse measurement method is self-report, whether in surveys or interviews, as these approaches are more likely to capture the cultural and contextual specificity of motives. Regardless, the main point is that without calibrating standard social science techniques to detect people’s wishes, desires, goals, and strivings, the search for motives grounded in a solid empirical footing will continue to be elusive.

Motives as Schemas

D’Andrade provides a swift solution to these problems: Conceptualize motives as schemas. Thinking of motives as schemas is useful, according to D’Andrade, because of three (representational) properties schemas have.

  • First, schemas can capture the processual and interpretive nature of many motives and motivations. In particular, schemas are useful for representing categorical domains with “prototype” organization, are readily memorable, and are used to fill in the blanks in context. Human motivation is one such domain. Representing goals in schematic format thus makes them cognitively available and usable.
  • Second, D’Andrade claims that schemas “have the potential of instigating action” (29). Although as we will see, he never quite cashes in on this claim. He points to the American “schema of achievement” as an example. D’Andrade notes that this schema does more than just representing the concept of achievement; it also functions as a “goal” for people. Albeit a goal of varying strength depending on the specificities of the situation in which it is activated.
  • Third, goal-schemas differ in their level of autonomy. This means that both motivations to engage in relatively short-term actions that are the means to larger goals, and more pervasive goals people pursue at longer time scales (perhaps lasting a lifetime) can be represented as schemas. In this way, low autonomy goals are embedded within larger projects. For instance, we activate the driving the car schema in order to make it to the PTA meeting, which satisfies a higher-order motive for affiliation or social integration. However, others (high autonomy) goals operate more or less as pervasive or chronically active (e.g., dominance, achievement). People for whom a given goal is in a high state of activation are likely to interpret even ambiguous cues in situations as prompts to engage in actions that are consistent with those goals.
  • Fourth, schemas differ in their schematicity, with some more specific or lower-level schemas nested within higher-level ones (thus reproducing standard categorical taxonomies). This, for D’Andrade, solves the problem of unstructured lists of motives. Instead of coming as an unstructured (and arbitrary) list, motives are structurally organized as hierarchies, with some of the vague needs and motivations (power, achievement, affiliation, and the like) being at the top, and then more specific action-guiding schemas (become a CEO, join the local PTA) at lower levels. For D’Andrade, goal-schemas at a lower-level of schematicity (and thus higher in specificity) are more context-driven, while higher-level (and thus more schematic) goal-schemas function as the pervasive “goals” of classical theories of motivation. These (autonomous) motives function “as a person’s most general goals,” or “master motives” (30). They are not directly connected to action (because many particular actions would be consistent with the schema). Still, They are connected to specific actions via more particular goal-schemas.

In sum, for D’Andrade, schemas solve many problems for anyone seeking to link culture, cognition, and motivation. Thinking of goals as having schematic representation in human memory allows us to understand human action as the result of cognitive structures activated in the situation, used by the person for categorization and interpretation, which ultimately “instigate” action. This context dependence accounts for situational variations in motivated action within-persons. At the same time, since motives differ in both autonomy and specificity, schemas can also represent pervasive, chronically active motivations that transcend situations. In contrast to the list of motives approach, the schema approach allows to properly theorize people’s goals as being part of an “overall interpretive system,” in which goals interrelate in structured ways, such as the hierarchical organization of lower-level goals nested within more schematic master motives. Finally, because schematic representation is a general representational format (capable of capturing anything that can be conceptually represented), there is no one “list” of motives; instead, “there are at least as many kinds of motives as there kinds of goal-schemas” (32). This accounts for cross-cultural variability in motivations since many goal-schemas will be specific to particular settings and locations. Schematic representation also facilitates the social-scientific job of identifying motives empirically. When motives are conceptualized as schemas, this task becomes the same as the more general endeavor of identifying schemas in text, discourse, and talk (Mohr et al. 2020; Quinn 2016).

How do Goal-Schemas Motivate?

D’Andrade’s argument that goals can be stored in human memory in the form of (more or less) schematic representations endowed with systematic organization is compelling. That is, D’Andrade provides (one) story of how one aspect of human motivation (the goals towards which we strive) is internalized as personal culture in the forms of a particular set of representations. However, representation is necessary but not sufficient for motivation. For a mental state or structure to be motivational, it must have the power to cause action. D’Andrade uses various metaphors to refer to this power in the paper, such as “instigate.” However, it is unclear how exactly a goal representation can be motivational. After all, we can have many goals represented in memory (or even currently active) without any of those goals “moving” us to act.

Toward the end of the paper, D’Andrade gives another shot to explaining how an internalized goal-schema can be motivating. Here, he moves to a different metaphor: The idea that some internalized goal-schemas have “directive force.” Directive force can be thought of in the (Durkheimian) sense of a given representation exercising a “sense of [moral] obligation” in people. But for D’Andrade, this is actually “a special case of the more general phenomenon of motivation.” And therefore, schemas are “equally central to things people wanted directly—love, friendship, success…some of these schemas turn out to have their own obligations as well as their direct and indirect rewards” (36). D’Andrade then notes that these provide a link between the conception of motives as goal-schemas and Melford Spiro’s model of “levels” of internalization of cultural beliefs. Schemas endowed with motivational force would thus be those that have the “deepest” levels of internalization in Spiro’s sense. According to Spiro, people can go from simply being “acquainted,” with some set of public representations (level 1), to accepting them as half-hearted cliches (level 2), to adopting them as part of their stock of personal beliefs (level 3), to having them motivate and guide their action in everyday life (level 4) (D’Andrade, 1995, pp. 227–228). Only culture “taken up” at levels 3 and 4 counts as “internalized,” in a way that could plausibly “motivate” action. 

However, there is a problem here. The idea of internalization “depth” that D’Andrade, Spiro, along with other psychological anthropologists (Quinn et al., 2018a, 2018b) talk about is not a generic internalization story (in the sense discussed in a previous post). Instead, it is a special-purpose story that only applies to culture internalized as explicit, verbalizable belief; essentially knowledge-that (as distinguished from knowledge-what; see here for further discussion of knowledge-what). In a later publication, D’Andrade made this clear, noting that “[a]t the third level [of internalization], individuals hold their beliefs to be true, correct, or right” (1995, pp. 228, italics added). But as described by D’Andrade, goal-schemas are not a type of knowledge-that. Instead, they are a type of (categorical or conceptual) knowledge-what, endowed with all the characteristics of concepts when internalized in long-term memory and used for the same tasks (interpretation, property induction, inference, categorization, and the like). 

In this last respect, “levels” of internalization can be plausibly distinguished for beliefs concerning the “commitment” dimension. But this “levels imagery breaks down when it comes to the internalization of conceptual knowledge-what. It is nonsensical to say that people have a “lightly held” concept of achievement, affiliation, power, self-enhancement, and the like. Individual differences in internalized knowledge-what can be made, but the relevant dimension of internalization is not “depth” or “commitment” but something like “elaborateness.” Experts in a domain have more elaborate concepts of the entities and activities in that domain, not “deeper” ones. People for whom achievement is important may also have a more elaborate conceptual network (and perhaps hierarchical schema taxonomy) connecting various achievement-related goals and actions across various settings. 

Overall, the metaphor of “cultural depth,” while taken as a general-purpose account of cultural internalization (Sewell, 1992; Swidler, 2001), is a special-purpose story applicable to certain forms of knowledge that, like beliefs, encoding propositions about the world. While distinctions between different internalization modes can be made concerning knowledge-what, these will have very little to do with the idea of “depth,” or strength of commitment. In the end, it is unclear whether a schema is the sort of internalized culture to which the idea of levels of commitment applies. But more generally, it is doubtful that one can get a theory of motivation from a theory of degrees of commitment to such entities as beliefs or propositions. This account of motivation is not only overly intellectualist (as it restricts itself to consciously held belief), it is also not compatible with the very definition of motivation that D’Andrade began the paper with (where motivation is defined in terms of desire, want, pleasure, and reward). This commitment theory of motivation is also incompatible with the schema theory of representation that D’Andrade pursues in the paper. While motivation does undoubtedly have a representational component (something cannot be a motivation unless it is represented cognitively by the agent in some way) that role remains obscured in D’Andrade’s treatment. 

Conclusion

Overall, D’Andrade’s critique of the “list of motives” approach is well-taken, as is his suggestion that thinking of goals is represented in long-term memory in the form of schemas. D’Andrade thus provides an instructive account of how thinking about the format of mental representation can help us rethink some central concepts in cultural analysis such as “goals” or “ends.” The paper’s key message is still a sound one; to link culture and action, you need to have a story of how culture is internalized and represented in memory.  Mental representation (of goals, needs, desires, objects) is key because there can be no motivation without representation (Schroeder 2004). This approach can be extended by considering that schemas are only one way to represent goals in memory. After all, there is no reason why (following Rupert 2011) goals could also be represented by a panoply of other types of representation described by cognitive scientists, including (already considered) propositional beliefs, episodic memories, action-oriented representations, embodied representations, perceptual symbols, and many others.

However, to connect culture represented at the personal level to action, we need a substantive account of how mental states can be implicated in the causation of action; essentially we need a theory of motivation. Unfortunately, D’Andrade never closes the gap between the general representational proposal and actual motivational mechanisms. Nowhere are we told how purely representational, conceptual, or schematic mental representations can go on to “energize” or sustain motivated action in context. Missing are key elements that any theory of motivation should have (and which were embedded in D’Andrade’s very definition of the concept), such as wants, striving, desire, reward, pleasure, reinforcement, and learning (Kringelbach and Berridge 2016). Instead, D’Andrade never moves from purely metaphorical versions of how a purely representational state links to action, for instance, speaking of schematically represented goals can “instigate” action once activated (which sounds like a covert, and largely unsatisfactory, “ideomotor” account of the link between represented goals action of the “monkey represents, monkey does” type). This cannot deal with the fact that people in a given setting walk around with many goal representations that never become motivational. Ultimately, it is unclear why some goal representations have this instigating virtue and others do not. 

When he tries to get more concrete, D’Andrade provides a (familiar to sociologist) story: the goal representations that motivate are the ones that have been “deeply” internalized. But beyond the fact that this is just another (spatial) metaphor, the account D’Andrade provides, based on Spiro’s theory of internalization, does not even match the representational format he spent the entire paper arguing goals are represented in: Conceptual knowledge-what combining procedural and declarative components. Instead, the Spiro levels account for a special-purpose internalization story applicable to “beliefs.” Even in the case of belief, it is unclear whether the Spiro story actually tells us how beliefs motivate without relying on circularities and tautologies. That is, it seems like the deeply internalized beliefs (levels 3 and 4) are the ones causally implicated in the production of action, but as we saw earlier, this is literally the definition of what it is for a mental state to be motivating. We are not given an “origin” story of why some belief-like mental states acquire this power. 

This is not to pile on D’Andrade (or Spiro). The problem of linking culture and action via motivation is a tough one. But as argued before, even if some solutions previously provided are not up to par, we can agree on what the general outlines of a satisfactory solution can be. In this post, we have learned that having an account of cultural internalization or how culture is represented in memory is not enough. This is especially the case when linking culture and motivation, because motivation while incorporating a representational component, is not exhausted by it. Thus a theory that links culture to action must also be a theory of motivation, as D’Andrade observed. Motivation is key, because it tells us which slice of the culture that people have internalized has causal effects on action and which one will not.

One problem is that contemporary social science does not have satisfactory conceptions of motivation (relying on outdated drive-reduction or “need” models). D’Andrade’s account in which “motivation is experienced as a desire or wish, followed by a feeling of satisfaction if the desire is fulfilled,” and is linked to internal processes that “energize” or activate people to act such that there is typically a striving for something—a goal directedness in behavior” (24) is not a bad one as a starter pack. However, as noted, none of these elements end up (striving, wish, pleasure, fulfillment) end up being linked to schemas as candidate motivating (and not just representational) structures in D’Andrade’s classic paper. Future posts will be dedicated to cracking the puzzle of motivation and linking it to cultural analysis. 

References

Cervone, D. (2005). Personality architecture: within-person structures and processes. Annual Review of Psychology, 56, 423–452.

D’Andrade, R. G. (1992). Schemas and motivation. In R. G. D’Andrade & C. Strauss (Eds.), Human motives and cultural models. (pp. 23–44). Cambridge University Press.

D’Andrade, R. G. (1995). The Development of Cognitive Anthropology. Cambridge University Press.

Kringelbach, M. L., & Berridge, K. C. (2016). Neuroscience of Reward, Motivation, and Drive. In Recent Developments in Neuroscience Research on Human Motivation (Vol. 19, pp. 23–35). Emerald Group Publishing Limited.

Mohr, J. W., Bail, C. A., Frye, M., Lena, J. C., Lizardo, O., McDonnell, T. E., Mische, A., Tavory, I., & Wherry, F. F. (2020). Measuring Culture. Columbia University Press.

Quinn, N. (2016). Finding Culture in Talk: A Collection of Methods. Springer.

Rupert, R. D. (2011). Embodiment, Consciousness, and the Massively Representational Mind. Philosophical Topics, 39(1), 99–120.

Schroeder, T. (2004). Three Faces of Desire. Oxford University Press.

Sewell, W. H., Jr. (1992). A Theory of Structure: Duality, Agency, and Transformation. The American Journal of Sociology, 98(1), 1–29.

Swidler, A. (2001). Talk of love: How culture matters. University of Chicago Press.

Turner, J. H. (2010). Motivational Dynamics in Encounters. In J. H. Turner (Ed.), Theoretical Principles of Sociology, Volume 2: Microdynamics (pp. 193–235). Springer New York.