Motivation and Personality

Classic books are often not read. Many people working for HR industry have heard about “the basic need hierarchy” hypothesis claimed by Abraham H. Maslow, but most of them have not read “Motivation and Personality”, in which Maslow developed his theory. Let me briefly summarize how the book goes.

Holistic approach
Maslow took holistic approach to investigate human nature. He claimed that the individual is an integrated, organized whole. At Maslow’s time, many psychological approaches tend to divide human motivation into detailed parts. He denied that methodology and argued that the satisfaction comes to the whole individual and not just to a part of him or her.

The same view is applied into psychotherapy. If the human needs are holistic and any mental illness comes from the deprivation of such needs, the cure should be holistic. Basic needs are mostly satisfiable only by other human beings, and that therefore therapy must take place mostly on an interpersonal basis (chap 9).



The basic needs hierarchy
He thought there is the basic needs hierarchy. The higher needs presuppose the satisfaction of the lower needs, though some step may seem to be not following the hierarchy. There are five needs, according to Maslow (chapter 2).

The first needs are the physiological needs. These needs, such as needs for water and foods, are the most fundamental needs. To describe this point, Maslow said as follows:
“Obviously a good way to obscure the higher motivations, and to get a lopsided view of human capacities and human nature, is to make the organism extremely and chronically hungry or thirsty. Anyone who attempts to make an emergency picture into a typical one and who sill measure all of humanity’s goals and desires by behavior during extreme physiological deprivation is certainly being blind to many things. It is quite true that humans live by bread alone-when there is no bread.”

When the first needs are satisfied, the second emerges – safety needs (security; stability; dependency; protection; freedom from fear, anxiety, and chaos; need for structure, order, law, and limits; strength in the protector; etc.).

If both the physiological and the safety needs are fairly well gratified, there will emerge the love and affection and belongingness needs. Maslow pointed out that the increase in training groups, personal growth groups, and intentional communities is the reflection of these needs. He also argued that even some youth rebellion is motivated by the hunger for group feelings, for contact, for real togetherness in the face of a common enemy. Maslow stressed that love is not synonymous with sex, as sex may be studied as a purely physiological need.

The fourth is a need or desire for self-esteem. The needs are (1) the desire for strength, achievement, adequacy, mastery and competence, (2) desire for reputation or prestige, status, fame and glory, dominance, recognition, attention, importance, dignity, or appreciation.

Even if all the four needs above are satisfied, we may still often expect that a new discontent and restlessness will soon develop, unless the individual is doing what he or she is fitted for – the self-actualization needs. Maslow was an inexhaustible seeker of self-actualizing people and described the self-actualization need in the following way:
“Musicians must make music, artists must paint, and poets must write if they are to be ultimately at peace with themselves. What humans can be, they must by. They must be true to their own nature. “


The characteristics of the higher needs
There are some relationship and characteristics of the higher needs mentioned above. Here are some of them (mostly chapter 5):
- The higher needs is a later phyletic (ontogenetic) or evolutionary development
- The higher the need, the less imperative it is for sheer survival; the longer gratification can be postponed, and the easier it is for the need to disappear permanently. The higher needs are less urgent subjectively.
- Living at the higher need level means greater biological efficiency, greater longevity, less disease, better sleep, appetite, and so on
- The higher the need level, the wider is the circle of love identification: the greater is the number of people love-identified with, and the greater is the average degree of love identification.
- Self-actualizing people enjoy healthier, more effective and happier lives
- Self-actualizing people tend not to seek sex for its own sake, or to be satisfied with it alone when it comes. (Chap12)
- Creativity is close to the self-actualization, but “special talent creativeness” is different from “self-actualizing creativeness”. The latter comes more directly from the personality, which showed itself widely in the ordinary affairs of life, and which showed itself not only in great and obvious products, but also in many other ways, in a certain kind of humor, a tendency to do anything creatively; for instance, teaching and so forth (chap 12)

The basic cognitive needs
Aside from the basic conative needs, Maslow claimed that there also are the basic cognitive needs, composed of (1) the desires to know and to understand and (2) the needs for beauty. The needs for understanding is came both from survival needs and the curiosity. The latter is more close to the self-actualizing needs. The needs for beauty are called the aesthetic needs. Some people get sick from ugliness, and are cured by beautiful surroundings.


Remarks
This book reminds me of Zen. I believe the true self -actualization is quite akin to the achievement of Zen. Just following one’s self-fulfilling motivation and nothing bothering. If we think this way, we will be able to understand more about the process of human mind development.

This book also tells us the importance of following one’s own passion. That is the way not only to regret one’s life but also to have happier, healthier and better life.



Reference
Abraham H. Maslow, “Motivation and Personality” (third edition), Longman, 1987

An Economic Theory of Democracy

In his book, “An Economic Theory of Democracy”, professor Anthony Downs tried to formulate voting theory based on rationality, by quoting Milton Friedman for potential criticism to his propositions: “Theoretical models should be tested primarily by the accuracy of their predictions rather than by the reality of their assumptions.”

In Down’s argument, rationality means maximizing one’s own utility (as it does in economics), and in this specific case, it means that a political party tries to maximize their votes. The underlying hypothesis is that (1) a political party seeks to control the governing apparatus by gaining office in a duly constituted election, and (2) for political parties to gain the office per se is beneficial to parties, i.e. they don’t formulate policy to achieve their political purpose; they formulate it to gain votes. The hypothesis is called “the party-motivation hypothesis”.

Prof. Downs also assumed rationality of voters (the citizen-rationality hypothesis). If that is the case, every citizen rationally attempts to maximize his utility.

By assuming rationality, author suggested many propositions. Let me introduce some of them.

1. A political party behaves such that marginal cost equals to marginal vote gain. In many cases, the best strategy seems to follow the majority, but just conforming to the will of majority does not guarantee reelection, because the oppositions form coalition and win by upholding the minority view on key issues (it would be especially the case, when there are many political issues.

2. Democratic governments tend to redistribute income from the rich to the poor, because the poor are majority. They also tend to favor producers more than consumers in their actions, because voters are more likely to exert political influence in their roles as income-receivers than in their roles as income-spenders. In other words, voters care more about their future income, not their way of consumption.

3. Voters are rational and gather information to maximize utility from their voting activities. Under certainty, in which voters can surely predict what political parties would do, gathering information makes sense. But under uncertainty, to gather information to be well-informed is costly and makes no sense in many cases, voters do not bother to discover their true views before voting but use heuristics such as knowing party’s ideology to cut their information costs. Predicting that voters use ideology as a label of parties’ political position, political parties use ideology to manifest their position to gain votes. Thus, the author argues that true political equality is impossible even in democracies if (1) uncertainty exists, (2) there is a division of labor, and (3) voters act rationally.

4. In a two-party system, both parties try to avoid losing majority position in every issue, whereas under a multiparty system, a party could be successful by making the best position-mix, e.g. taking majority position in specific issues but not doing so in some issues. Thus, party policies in a two-party system are (a) more vague, (b) more similar to those of other parties, and (c) less directly linked to an ideology than in a multiparty system. The proposition is called “convergence theorem”.

5. A large percentage of citizens – including voters – do not become informed to any significant degree on the issues involved in elections, even if they believe the outcomes to be important. In some cases they abstain. Voters do so because the cost to be informed exceeds the benefit of voting composed of (1) the benefits a voter gets from democracy, (2) how much he wants a particular party to win, (3) how close a voter thinks the election will be, and (4) how many other citizens he thinks will vote.

Remarks

To me, it was remarkable that just applying economic theory into political analysis gained many citations. This fact tells me the importance to be the first mover, and in many cases to be the first is to connect different things. Even now, there could be many topics waiting to be connected with different things.

Many of the hypotheses and propositions here make sense to me: the ignorance of voters despite the importance of issues in some elections, parties acting just to be elected, etc. Even though many scholars criticized the incompleteness and flaws of Down’s arguments, his contribution for opening up new way of political analysis should be highly evaluated. The analysis could be applied to study other sorts of collective actions.

Reference

“An Economic Theory of Democracy”, Anthony Downs, Addison Wesley, (1997/1/21)

The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception

James J. Gibson offered a new visual perception theory, opposed to the gestalt psychology. In this post, let me explain general concept of it.

Visual Perception of Gestalt Psychology

Before Gibson, perception theories like that of Gestalt psychology suggested that all perceptions, including visual perceptions, are based on one’s experience and the cognitive organs (a reference for the theory would be “metaphors we live by”). In other words, in order to perceive the world, one must already have ideas about it.

According to Prof. Gibson, however, it is circular reference of perception, since if a new perception requires a preceding experience within one’s mind, one needs to already have the new experience, before he or she experiences it.

Ecological Approach to Visual Perception

To overcome the problem of circular reference, professor Gibson came up with the ecological approach to visual perception. The hypothesis assumes that the inner system of human being does not construct the perception based on stimulus, but the environment in itself provides its information for our direct perception (the notion about the direct perception is called information pickup theory). According to the hypothesis, the perception of the environment is based on invariant-extraction from the flux, not based on a sequence of snapshots. The style of perception is ecological, because the perception is not made solely by human beings, but by the interrelationship among the constituents of the environment. Gestalt theory requires gestalt within one’s mind, but the ecological approach to visual perception requires gestalt within the environment.

Related to prof. Gibson’s visual perception theory, there are some important concepts. I would like to mention about them.

One is the interrelationship between subject and object in visual perception. Prof. Gibson claimed that one perceives both environment and oneself at the same time. It is in some sense obvious: when we walk around, we see our legs as well as the changing sight of the outer environment. When we look around the environment, whatever goes out of sight comes into sight, and what ever comes into sight goes out of sight.

“The head turns, and whatever way in back of the head at one time will be in front of the head of another and vice versa. This fact is fundamental for the theory of perception.” (page 112)

Another is affordance theory. Affordances are all action possibilities latent in the environment, objectively reasonable and independent of the individuals’ ability to recognize them, but always in relation to the action and therefore dependent on the individuals’ capabilities. According to the theory, the world is perceived not only in terms of object shapes and spatial relationship but also in terms of object possibility of action (affordance). For instance, when we are looking at a building (environment), we know that the image changes (affordance), when we walk around the building. Gibson argued that we perceive the affordances because of our life needs: environments offer benefit, injury, life, death, and the other critical effects.

The third is our direct perception of layout. When we look at the sight of a road, we perceive it neither as 2 dimensional nor as 3 dimensional. Instead, we perceive it as a layout, prof. Gibson argued. For example, when we look at a sight and estimate the distance from here to the building over there, we can estimate the distance not because we are able to perceive the visual environment in 3D, but because we just directly understand the layout of the things in the environment: for instance, if the road is made of bricks, we will be able to estimate the distance from here to the building by counting approximately how many bricks are there between here and there. This concept of direct visual perception explains why we sometimes wrongly estimate the distance.

Remarks

It was a tough book to fathom the concept. The explanation of direct perception theory was difficult to follow, but after spending some days, I finally realize what he said. What he offered was a Copernican change in perception theory, which was quite interesting and worth for deep consideration. With that said, I still don’t quite understand which theory is correct: direct or indirect visual perception. Especially, I don’t know why we can say that the experience has no impact on our way of perception. The argument is a bit counter-intuitive.

Reference

James J. Gibson, “The Ecological Approach To Visual Perception”, 1986/10/13, Psychology Press

The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception

James J. Gibson offered a new visual perception theory, opposed to the gestalt psychology. In this post, let me explain general concept of it.

Visual Perception of Gestalt Psychology

Before Gibson, perception theories like that of Gestalt psychology suggested that all perceptions, including visual perceptions, are based on one’s experience and the cognitive organs (a reference for the theory would be “metaphors we live by”). In other words, in order to perceive the world, one must already have ideas about it.

According to Prof. Gibson, however, it is circular reference of perception, since if a new perception requires a preceding experience within one’s mind, one needs to already have the new experience, before he or she experiences it.

Ecological Approach to Visual Perception

To overcome the problem of circular reference, professor Gibson came up with the ecological approach to visual perception. The hypothesis assumes that the inner system of human being does not construct the perception based on stimulus, but the environment in itself provides its information for our direct perception (the notion about the direct perception is called information pickup theory). According to the hypothesis, the perception of the environment is based on invariant-extraction from the flux, not based on a sequence of snapshots. The style of perception is ecological, because the perception is not made solely by human beings, but by the interrelationship among the constituents of the environment. Gestalt theory requires gestalt within one’s mind, but the ecological approach to visual perception requires gestalt within the environment.

Related to prof. Gibson’s visual perception theory, there are some important concepts. I would like to mention about them.

One is the interrelationship between subject and object in visual perception. Prof. Gibson claimed that one perceives both environment and oneself at the same time. It is in some sense obvious: when we walk around, we see our legs as well as the changing sight of the outer environment. When we look around the environment, whatever goes out of sight comes into sight, and what ever comes into sight goes out of sight.

“The head turns, and whatever way in back of the head at one time will be in front of the head of another and vice versa. This fact is fundamental for the theory of perception.” (page 112)

Another is affordance theory. Affordances are all action possibilities latent in the environment, objectively reasonable and independent of the individuals’ ability to recognize them, but always in relation to the action and therefore dependent on the individuals’ capabilities. According to the theory, the world is perceived not only in terms of object shapes and spatial relationship but also in terms of object possibility of action (affordance). For instance, when we are looking at a building (environment), we know that the image changes (affordance), when we walk around the building. Gibson argued that we perceive the affordances because of our life needs: environments offer benefit, injury, life, death, and the other critical effects.

The third is our direct perception of layout. When we look at the sight of a road, we perceive it neither as 2 dimensional nor as 3 dimensional. Instead, we perceive it as a layout, prof. Gibson argued. For example, when we look at a sight and estimate the distance from here to the building over there, we can estimate the distance not because we are able to perceive the visual environment in 3D, but because we just directly understand the layout of the things in the environment: for instance, if the road is made of bricks, we will be able to estimate the distance from here to the building by counting approximately how many bricks are there between here and there. This concept of direct visual perception explains why we sometimes wrongly estimate the distance.

Remarks

It was a tough book to fathom the concept. The explanation of direct perception theory was difficult to follow, but after spending some days, I finally realize what he said. What he offered was a Copernican change in perception theory, which was quite interesting and worth for deep consideration. With that said, I still don’t quite understand which theory is correct: direct or indirect visual perception. Especially, I don’t know why we can say that the experience has no impact on our way of perception. The argument is a bit counter-intuitive.

James J. Gibson, “The Ecological Approach To Visual Perception”, 1986/10/13, Psychology Press