Beyond Pleasure and Pain: How Motivation Works by E. Tory Higgins

Author:E. Tory Higgins [Higgins, E. Tory]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, pdf
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: 2011-09-12T14:00:00+00:00

10

Value–Truth–Control Relations

Organization of Motives

I have described in this book a myriad of ways in which motivation goes beyond pleasure and pain. Even when it comes to having desired results, there is more to value than just maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain. There is an experience of effectiveness, an experience of success at having desired results, that is not simply feeling pleasure. And there are ways of being effective beyond value. There is the truth effectiveness of establishing what’s real and the control effectiveness of managing what happens. But the most significant way that motivation goes beyond pleasure and pain lies in its multidimensional nature. Yes, motivation is not just about the hedonic dimension of pleasure and pain. But motivation is also not just about adding the dimension of truth or the dimension of control either. What motivation is fundamentally about is the relations between and among motivational dimensions—the organization of motives. It is about value, truth, and control working together to create commitment, fit, and going in the right direction. Motivations organized and working together is why motivation is Beyond Pleasure and Pain.

In Chapters 7, 8, and 9, I have discussed how value, truth, and control work together as pairs of motivations. The commitment, fit, and direction created by such partnerships are central to the story of motivation. But the story would not be complete without considering how all three motivations work together as an organization of motives. Indeed, this part of the story is so important that my original title for the book was Organization of Motives: Value, Truth & Control Working Together. There were two inspirations for this original title: Donald Hebb’s book The Organization of Behavior1 and Kurt Lewin’s book Field Theory in Social Science.2 Part of the inspiration was personal. Hebb was my first psychology teacher when I was an undergraduate student at McGill University. Lewin was the mentor of my first psychology teacher, Stanley Schachter, when I was a graduate student at Columbia University. Not surprisingly, I learned about Hebb’s theories and research in that first undergraduate class, and I learned a lot about Lewin’s theories and research (as well as Schachter’s) in that first graduate class.

Hebb and Lewin had a profound influence on me at the time and their influence has lasted. Only much later, however, did I fully appreciate a basic commonality between them. Simply put, they both believed that the elements that determined behavior did not work independently, each with its own separate effect, but, instead, they worked together as interrelated, organized elements where the whole was not only greater than, but also different from, the sum of its parts. It is the purpose of this chapter to describe the motivationally significant properties of the organization formed by value, truth, and control working together. But before describing these properties, I need to provide some examples of different organizations and to describe the relation between their whole and their parts.

MOTIVATIONS WORKING TOGETHER IN PROMOTION AND PREVENTION

I will begin by revisiting the distinct motivational systems of promotion and prevention.

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