Warning: More long ramblings I seem to be in an essay writing mode at the moment. Normally I would think this is because I’m avoiding working on my thesis, but I’ve worked on my thesis quite a bit, so who knows.
What with all of this talk of academia and motivation, and food-care, I got to thinking about how different political viewpoints tend to have different ideas of how people actually work, psychologically (this then made me want to go and make a mult-agent model, but I’m putting that aside for the time being). In particular, people have various ideas about what motivates people.
For example, some people take the view that people will mainly be motivated if they don’t have their basic needs met. So, if you don’t have a guarantee of food, clothing, housing, medical care, that sort of thing, you will be motivated to work hard. If, on the other hand, you have all of your basic needs met, you will be left with no motivation. I’m not sure what will happen then- I guess the prediction in this case is that you will just sit around and do nothing.
Another example is the view that people are mainly motivated to do things for themselves, and not for other people. Thus, if you left them alone, they would just take care of themselves. In this case, you would further predict that you would need laws to make sure that people helped others, once their own needs had been met.
I think these are both somewhat corse-grained approaches. First of all, the assumption that all humans are the same with respect to what will motivate them is up for debate. Also I think it would be good to consider both what effect other factors can have on motivation and also on whether or not motivation is necessarily connected with other things, like happiness and consideration for others.
My own suspicion is that if you took a bunch of people, and met their basic requirements, some of them would sit around and do nothing, but a majority of them would still want to do something more than sit around. I’m not sure what they would do, but I think they would do something. Actually, I’m kind of curious as to what humans really would do in that situation. Similarly, I suspect that, even without laws, at least some people would try to help out and improve or enrich the lives of other people around them, even if they received no direct reward for doing so.
I also suspect that it is quite possible for people to be motivated, but not happy or content. For example, if you know that not working will mean you end up starving or homeless, you might work hard, but you also might not feel too relaxed and happy. You might instead end up with a society of hard working, unhappy people. But maybe not- maybe some people would still be quite happy in this situation, because they would feel that they were successfully looking after their own well-fare.
Who knows? given that these are all just ad-hoc ideas, off the top of
everyone’s heads, you’ve got to wonder what is actually the case with
humans. At least- I sure do. And I would be surprised if there weren’t
various
theories of motivation, along with experiments on motivation that we
could be using to give us a more sophisticated understanding of the
situation.
posted at 12:00 on Fri, 10 Feb, 2006 |
path: /living
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