Motivation & Humanistic Theories Flashcards
Need
According to Murray’s motivational theory, what is a need, a motive, and an environmental press?
Need: a physiochemical force in the brain that organizes perception, intellection, and action in such a way as to transform an unsatisfying situation into a more satisfying one (not consciously experienced)
Murray distinguished 6 category needs: Viscerogenic needs
- (e.g. need for food)
- Tied to basic, physiological functioning
Murray distinguished 6 category needs: Psychogenic needs
(e.g. need for achievement)
Murray distinguished 6 category needs: Adience needs
(i.e. approach needs; e.g. in food)
Murray distinguished 6 category needs: Abience needs
(i.e. avoidance needs, e.g. n Harm avoidance)
Murray distinguished 6 category needs: Reactive Needs
- external cues
- (e.g. need for harm avoidance)
Murray distinguished 6 category needs: Proactive needs
- Internal cues
- (e.g. need for food)
How can an individual’s needs be ranked?
An individual’s needs can be rank ordered from strongest to weakest, creating a “hierarchy of needs” that characterizes the individual’s personality
Motive
According to Murray’s motivational theory, what is a need, a motive, and an environmental press?
- elicited by a need, direct thought, and behaviour toward or away from objects, people, and goals (manifests at a psychological level, therefore a conscious experience)
EXAMPLE: Need (for food) -> motive (hunger)
* Thought (thinking of last night’s dinner, fantasizing about a big meal, perceiving a rock as a loaf of bread)
* Behaviour (prepare a meal, go to a restaurant)
Environmental press
According to Murray’s motivational theory, what is a need, a motive, and an environmental press?
- a situational factor that increase or decreases a motive and, consequently, influences thought and behaviour
- Environmental press can affect motive (EXAMPLE ON SLIDE 15)
How are needs measured?
Thematic apperception test
Projective tests
Thematic apperception test
- Projective tests: involve presenting participants with images of ambiguous situations, assume that participants “project” their needs, onto the ambiguous situations
- Allow for the assessment of implicit needs (vs, explicit needs or self-attributed needs)
- Murray’s list of psychogenic needs (should know which people exhibit through their interpretations of images - practice done in class)
Possible criticisms of the thematic apperception test: poor inter-rater reliability
Don’t find the same dominant needs across different interpretations
Possible criticisms of the thematic apperception test: poor internal consistency
- High degree of variability in images
- Pressure of respondents to feel like the shouldn’t be redundant across stories
- Varies with respondent’s creativity
- Pressure to feel like they need to produce creative stories
Other possible criticisms of the thematic apperception test
Limited to our explicit needs and motives
What alternatives can we have? (to the Thematic Apperception Test)
- Personality research form
- Multi-motive grid
Personality research form
What alternatives can we have? (to the Thematic Apperception Test)
- Self-report measure; allows for the assessments of explicit needs (vs. implicit needs)
Example: need for achievement
* I look more to the future than to the past or present
- Participants scores are analyzed to identify their dominant needs; accomplished by summing the items related to each of the 22 needs
- Participants’ dominant needs form the defining characteristics of their personality
Multi-motive grid
What alternatives can we have? (to the Thematic Apperception Test)
- Projective test: involves presenting participants with images of ambiguous situations, assume that participants “project: their needs onto the ambiguous situations
- Self-report measure; 18 true or false q’s that assess the 3 needs (the big 3, n achievement , n affiliation, n power)
- Allows for the assessment of implicit and explicit needs
