I started a thread sometime back asking whether humans are driven by one fundamental motivation or several competing ones, and the discussion was helpful—well, there were disagreements over particular theories, but I came away thinking that motivational pluralism is itself no longer especially controversial. Most contemporary approaches seem quite comfortable with the idea that several motivations can coexist within the same person. Although it did partly answer my question, I came out with another one. I’ve come to notice that different traditions seem to be explaining different aspects of the same phenomenon. Evolutionary psychology, for example, explains why motivational tendencies such as hunger, attachment, or fear may have evolved. Panksepp’s work in affective neuroscience identifies evolutionary conserved systems that organize behavior across mammals. Kurt Lewin’s field theory treated behavior as the result of interacting psychological forces within a dynamic field, and of everything I’ve read so far, this seems to come closest to what I am interested in. Thinkers like Plato and Freud also recognized that humans experience genuine internal conflict, well, even though they proposed very different ways of understanding it. Comparing all these approaches, they seem to each explain a different aspect of the same phenomenon. This brings me to the question that has been occupying me recently.
Imagine someone who is hungry but continues a religious fast, or a firefighter who feels fear but still enters a burning building, or even a parent who desperately wants to rest but still gets up again to comfort a crying child. I can see how different traditions explain why hunger, fear, or attachment exists, or how choices may be evaluated. What I am less certain about, though, is whether there is an established account whose primary concern is explaining how these competing motivations become organized into a single action. Is this already a well-developed problem within the literature on action and motivation? Or do most theories just explain different parts of the picture, like evolutionary origins, emotional systems, utility, or internal conflict, without making the organization of action itself their central concern?
The fact is we don’t understand how the brain operates well enough to know the answer.
There is a trend in psychology to reject dualism. In paricular, to reject the almost intuitive idea that the mind contaims a non physical version of ourselves who exercises decision making functions and directs action.
Once we accept thats not the case, we have varous competing views about how the mind decides to choose between, global workspace and multiple drafts
I am hoping someone is going to explain these in ways that I can easily understand but have so far been disappointed.
The fact is we don’t understand how the brain operates well enough to know the answer
Is it actually necessary to understand the brain completely before we can explain the organisation of behavior? I mean we have explanatory frameworks that operate successfully without a complete account of their physical implementation.
Once we accept that’s not the case, we have various competing views about how the mind decides to choose between, global workspace and multiple drafts
Well, although I don’t have an in-depth understanding of either theory, I have read quite a bit about them and in this era information is just a click away, so I’ve tried to at least get a basic grasp of both. My current understanding is that they seem to explain how information becomes globally accessible or consciously experienced, but not at least in their original formulations how competing motivations become organized into action/behavior. I’ve also come across LIDA. From what I’ve read, it seems to extend ideas from GWT by incorporating an action selection mechanism. Even so, my impression of it is that its primary concern seems to be action selection, but what I’m trying to understand is slightly different: how competing motivations become organized into an action/behavior that eventually emerges.
I may be drawing the distinction too sharply, though, so I’d be interested to know if there’s any literature I’m overlooking that treats those as the same problem.
I was reading “Does Altruism exist” by David Sloan Wilson’ and he gave a good example of distributed intelligence.
Researcher have built potential sites for hives on a Scottish Island and swarms of bees are released on the site. They regularly find the best site even if only one bee finds it and reports. Thats because individual bees are good at communicating the precise significance of their finds to the swarm.
DSW implies the same might be true of multiple drafts. By which I mean the different motivations in the brain that initial arise prior to an action.. With motivation may have a weight assigned to it as part of the drafting. This makes distributed intelligence a little more comprehensible to me.
What you need is a grant, to conduct a study/do a survey. The question you pose - how do various motivations get resolved into a single action? - can’t be answered from an armchair.
Often situations and environmental cues drive behavior. My behavior can be a function of my interest to observe, adjust to, or protest against an actual situation or environment.
In this sense, behavior is organized by the situation, not a competition or computational process among innate or acquired motivations.
Well that’s a useful analogy and I see how it makes distributed intelligence more intuitive. But it’s addressing one possible mechanism by which competing motivations become organized. My original point though starts a step earlier than that—the question I’m trying to raise is whether the organization of behavior itself has become an explanatory problem. If so, then before we settle on any particular mechanism, I think we first need to acknowledge that the organization itself is something requiring explanation rather than something we merely assume.
I do agree that situation and environmental cues strongly affect behavior, but they don’t eliminate the organizational problem; they become a part of it. The same situation can lead one person to help, another to flee, another to protest, and another to ignore it altogether. So the situation alone doesn’t determine behavior; it still has to be interpreted and integrated with the individual’s existing motivational state. In that sense, environmental cues do help shape behavior, but they still don’t by themselves explain how competing motivational influences become organized into a single action.
There’s a book by John Doris on situationism in which he writes about the relation between motivations or character traits and situations. I bet you can find good stuff there. Here’s a sample.
I’ve been going through Doris’s work for the last few days. Well, he does a very good job showing that situations matter. Being in a hurry, finding a dime, being under authority—they all clearly change how people behave. But it mostly reinforced some of my already accepted beliefs, and I still came back carrying my question… but what happens when several of those influences are present at once?
Suppose I’m under time pressure, I genuinely want to help, I’m worried about what others might think of me, and I’m also thinking about my own interests. At that point, I start wondering less about whether each influence matters and more about how they end up resolving into one thing I actually do. Well, maybe that’s just a different question from the one he was trying to answer, but that’s where his book left me.
When there are multiple influences competing for our attention, we weigh their relative priorities (to us), and go with the highest priority. Don’t we? Isn’t it that simple?
Well, I suppose I’d agree with you in the sense that whatever we eventually do is probably the thing that has become the highest priority for us at that moment. But that’s actually where my question starts rather than ends.
When you say we “weigh their relative priorities,” I’m wondering what that weighting consists of. If several influences are present at once—say I genuinely want to help someone, I’m under time pressure, I’m worried about what others might think of me, and I am also thinking about my own interests—how do those different influences end up becoming one priority rather than several competing ones?
Saying “we go with the highest priority” feels a bit like saying “the winner is the one who gets the most votes.” That’s true enough, but it leaves me asking how the votes were cast in the first place, and that’s the part I’m interested in.
perhaps… It really makes me wonder if we’ve quietly smuggled the problem into the word weighing though, because once we ask what that process actually is, the map starts running out.
Yes. I think we often do this, almost always unintentionally. Often it looks (even to us) like we’re offering an explanation, but we’re just shifting the problem, as you say.
perhaps… It really makes me wonder if we’ve quietly smuggled the problem into the word weighing though, because once we ask what that process actually is, the map starts running out.