Native and Acquired Factors in Motivation

Just as native or unlearned responses lie at the basis of all behavior, so the fundamental organic drives are the foundations of all motivation. The essential vigor of human responses arises from the internal conditions of the body. The elementary motives that have been discussed so far may be considered as native ones. Most of these, such as hunger, thirst, unfavorable temperature liberation through the skin, rest and sleep, elimination of waste products, certain aspects of sex, and the effects of emotional states, are internal. Some external stimuli also may be regarded as native arousers of behavior. These include tissue injury and other forms of excessively intense stimulation, and those milder skin stimuli leading to the so-called "love" responses. In general, the internal stimuli are originally more important than the external ones. External stimuli may set off responses, but these are directed, facilitated, or inhibited by the inner state. The total organism, with its characteristic structures and functions as organized into a living whole, possesses the energy and the modes of response which the stimulus, only releases. The key to man and to subhuman forms is to be sought more in the enormously complex energy changes going on within him than in the fortuitous play of outside energies working on him.

In the course of the development of motives, external stimuli come to play a larger part, but the essential controlling forces remain those within the organism.

The Modification of Motives

Problems of child behavior are complicated by the inextricable blending of native and acquired elements. Conditioning, learning, and habit formation begin the transformation of native responses immediately after birth. Acquired motives are largely developments from the early native ones, but the origin and development of a motive activating the child at the age of ten or twelve years only rarely can be traced in adequate detail. Habits, purposes, and ideals are still more complex forms of acquired motives, although even in these, the native elements might be found to furnish important parts of the total pattern, if we could only resolve it into its native and acquired components.

We see this process of modifying or conditioning drives in many features of child development, as when some external stimuli are substituted for the earlier internal native ones. Thus, at first the stimuli to play probably come from within, but later external stimulation may set off these activities, as when the child sees other children with whom he plays. The sight or smell of food may come to elicit responses which are aroused originally only by the actual pangs of hunger. Merely thinking about food may start off the flow of saliva which originally was activated, by the sight or smell of food. Thus, organic drives eventuating in positive (or negative) responses may become conditioned to various external stimuli. The sight, taste, smell, color, or merely the idea of an object associated with some unpleasant event may come to arouse the response originally evoked by that event. A child at a very early age is bitten by a large black dog. For years he may be decidedly afraid of dogs, and he may even find himself making incipient negative responses to a wide variety of objects that in some way resemble the black dog. A boy of six stepped on the tail of a sleeping Scotch collie, whereupon the dog lunged for the boy's throat, but jumped too high, sinking his two tusks in the boy's upper lip. For years the boy had a violent fear of large dogs, although he had always played with dogs and continued to play with dogs which were not strange to him. A boy of ten, trying to slide on the ice on a little pond into which refuse from a paper mill was dumped, broke through the thin ice which covered the shallow water and sank in above, his waist. For some minutes he was doubtful of his ability to extricate himself. Finally he got hold of a branch of a small willow tree and pulled himself toward the bank and out of the thick, slimy, vilesmelling, nauseating stuff. He, too, for years, at the sight of any place where the ground was yellowish, which had a small shallow puddle of clear water on part of it, and had a few small straggly willow trees about, not only felt afraid, but also felt strong disgust and some nausea at the anticipated thick, slimy, vile-smelling refuse. Even now, in maturity, although he cannot recall vividly the appearance of the place where he had the unpleasant experience, he occasionally sees a place which he instantly recognizes as like that of the childhood episode, and has some feeling of disgust and aversion.

It is evident from the above instances that the principal mechanism operating in the substitution of motive-stimuli is that of the conditioned reaction. By the simultaneous occurrence of an external stimulus with the original internal or sufficient one, the former becomes capable of evoking the behavior in question. This pattern of learning applies as clearly in the case of motives, likes, aversions, and interests as in simpler muscular or glandular responses.

Another class of stimuli, words, come to act as motives through the operation of the same processes of learning. The development of language permits the visual or auditory symbols of things to function in place of the things themselves. Commands, offers of reward, soothing commendations, all commonly act as motives at the earliest ages in which language is understood. As the child grows older, the motivating power of language symbols increases with his experience with them.