Sources of Motivation
Anna Van Norton
PSY/355
6-28-14
Stephan Brown

Sources of Motivation

Motivation is behind everyone’s behavior, people are motivated to achieve their goals, meet certain criteria’s, and define their purpose in life. Motivation is important in all aspect of out life to be able to have a happy, successful life. Everyone is motivated in different ways and in order for a person to survive a person must have the will power to do well and to succeed in life. Motivation is a set of factors that activate and maintain a person’s behavior, usually towards a certain goal (Huffman, 2010). A person does not behave without a reason or motivation, and these motivations help a person push forward to achieve a task. There are several theories of motivation, internal, external, and social motivators that influence a person’s behavior. Motivation can be easily defined as a reason behind why a person acts a certain way. Motivation consists of biological, social, emotional, and cognitive powers that initiate a certain behavior. The three mechanisms of motivation are persistence, intensity, and activation. Persistence is nonstop determination that a person has towards a certain goal, and intensity is the strength and power that goes into one pursuing their goal, and activation implicates a choice to initiate behavior. The two in particular that I will be discussing in this paper will be internal and external motivators.

Internal sources are those that are biological and psychological variables that have developed during the shared evolutionary past and from the person personal history. External sources are known as incentive and goals; external sources refer to what is available to a person’s environment (Deckers, 2010). Internal sources, the individual’s biological variables and psychological variables will determine what will be motivating to them. Great examples of psychological variables would be one’s happiness, anxiety or the need to fit in and belong, while biological variables are material characteristics of the body and brain, which will motivate one’s behavior. A great example of a biological variable is hunger. When a person is hunger, there will be a lower level glucose, which interplays with several hormones. People feel the need to fit in with a certain social group so when they are not content with their social status they change their behavior to make a social group like them better. External sources are sources that are made available to the individual’s environment. Such incentives are environmentally available anticipated events or rewards. These external rewards have a great effect on a person’s behavior, and the incentive, goals; pull a person toward the end-state. Some incentives or goals that can be rewarding can be money, career, and the encouragement or admiration from another individual. Internal and external motivators are what move an individual into action.

It is said “to be motivated is to be moved into action, or for a person to make a choice to change for the better according to Arthur Schopenhauer.”(Deckers,2010). The first hint of speculations that have to do with the relationship between behavior and motivation came from Schopenhauer. A person behavior or one’s actions do not occur spontaneously so, therefore a person’s behavior, or actions occur because of internal motivators or environmental incentives. Motives are known as one’s internal disposition to approach and are concerned with positive incentives and to avoid negative incentives. Incentives are the things that an individual will anticipate as a reward that will become available in their environment. A person’s behavior can be easily changed by incentives, therefore linking incentives with motives. Motives can control or drive an individual’s behavior. The source of motivation is what pushes and pulls a person to behave a certain way. Therefore motivated behavior is the result