Motivation: the missing key to understanding people

Homicide investigators often pursue murderers by looking at a suspect’s motivation. What does X have to gain by killing Y? The idea is that there is some logic in people’s actions: we do things to achieve certain goals or because our belief systems suggest particular decisions.

Understanding people’s motivations is crucial not just to homicide investigators, but also to market researchers, advertising executives, parents, politicians, counselors, pastors, and teachers. Anyone whose job success depends on unraveling or influencing other people’s behavior needs to know why people do what they do.

But like everything else about humans, motivation is mysterious and fluid. Ask yourself why you did this and not that, and you will probably either give a rote answer, “I did it because it was the right thing to do,” or flounder around in words till you come up with some limp rationale, “It just felt like the thing to do.”

Failing forward

I have been an educator (professor, journalist, teacher, writer, department head, instructor, counselor, workshop facilitator, parent, tutor, volunteer/leader, management consultant, and college administrator) my entire career, so I have never stopped thinking about what motivates people and how I can use my skills to motivate the people I work with.

Last weekend I was part of a seminar on helping college students to “fail forward.” The idea was to show students who have failed (didn’t pass a test, couldn’t understand a concept, made a failing grade on a high-stakes assignment) how to use their failure to move ahead in the class.

Most of the suggested strategies were variations of reframing (showing students how to reframe the failure as a success by finding what was learned in the experience and focusing on that rather than what was not learned). Professors were encouraged to model problem-solving behavior and share their own personal instances of turning failure into success. Mention was made of reaching out to students to find out if personal issues were interfering with their ability to do their class work.

All of these ideas and techniques were well-intentioned. I’ve used them all myself, with good results over the years. But I wonder about the cause-and-effect relationship: are the strategies working, or is it just coincidence that what we do as influencers seems to motivate others?

Motivating others

Cause-and-effect is usually measured in numbers, which is today’s preferred method of evaluation. How many students passed my class? Or how many people bought a certain brand, voted for a particular candidate, attended a religious service, graduated from high school, or gained better mental health as counted by such criteria as “held a job for one year” or “refrained from alcohol dependence for three months”?

How can we measure what kind of impact we have on other people’s decisions? How can we say that we motivated someone to do what we wanted them to do?

And how much of what we call “motivation” is spurred by fear, violence, or totalitarian authority? People may act as we think best not because they respect us or want to be like us, but because they are afraid of some punishment if they do not.

Where is the key?

Motivation is seen as the key to all human behavior, but we know very little about why we ourselves do what we do, let alone why anyone else does. Gossip tries to assign motive, but it’s usually a guess and tells us more about the person guessing than the person being guessed about.

How can we find this key? Sometimes by developing empathy (putting ourselves in someone’s shoes), sometimes by logical analysis (those famous numbers: charts, graphs, and statistics), sometimes by observation over time, and sometimes by our own brilliant insights.

But none of these methods (or even all of them used together) can ever get at the core of understanding motivation, which is at the core of human behavior. The best we can do is try to figure out our own motivational patterns—this will show us the complexity and opacity, the rationalizations and depth, of our own personality and help us avoid easy and superficial solutions to the task of motivating others.