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Get the answer of: How Motives Influence Behaviour of a Man?
All human behaviour involves attitudes and interests. But adequate explanation of overt behaviour of human beings is not possible simply in terms of these two elements. A question of deeper significance remains unanswered.
Why should a particular individual have an attitude of hostility or friendliness toward, say, one of his neighbors? This brings us to the question of motive.’ That is, it is exceedingly important to know what exactly motivates people to act or behave in the way they do.
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For instance, there may be variety of reasons which prompted a murderer to commit the crime. It may be the lure of money, or it may be consideration of self-defence, or it may be the desire to wreak vengeance. It is obviously not enough to record that a murder has been committed.
It is necessary, in the interest of social stability, to delve into the motives which prompted the murderer to commit the crime. The attitude of the murderer towards his victim may be partly, if not wholly, responsible for the crime.
The desire to wreak vengeance falls under this category. Or, the interest of the murderer might have been primarily responsible. The lure of financial gain falls under this category. It is necessary to disentangle, as far as possible, one from the other and ascertain the true ‘motive’ behind the murder. In seeking to do so, we may have to go deeper into “various levels of the conscious, sub-conscious or unconscious”.
In sociology we are not interested in a discussion on the entire gamut of psychological exploration and analysis. A sociologist is rather interested in finding out how far and in what manner social conditions “are the effective incitements to action that lie behind our acts, behind the show of things”.
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We know that ‘motives’ cannot be explained in terms of instincts. Sometimes attempt is made to explain ‘motive or ‘motivation’ of man in terms of hedonistic principle, i.e., the pursuit of pleasure and avoidance of pain. The basic assumption of such an exercise is that man is selfish and that he seeks to maximise his gain and minimise his loss.
Talcott Parsons has characterised this line of thinking as ‘self-interested’ or ‘egoistic’ theory. In his opinion, the theory is fallacious. The theory assumes that man is guided by rational considerations of gain and loss. Such an assumption is unacceptable. To begin with, many of our actions are dictated by customs and rituals.
The hoary past beckons to us, as it were, and we respond to the call. Max Weber characterised such action as traditional action. Secondly, we live in a normative society. As such, various norms in the form of values, beliefs, maxims, etc. exercise a profound influence in all we do, in the way we behave. In other words, many of our actions are culturally determined, and not always in terms of rational calculation of gain and loss.
Thirdly, even some economic activities defy explanation in terms of economic rationality, i.e., the desire to maximise gain and minimise loss, the desire to maximise productivity and minimise cost. Economic motivation is one among many others which have a bearing on economic pursuits.
The observations of Talcott Parsons on this aspect are very pertinent.
“Economic motivation is not a category of motivation on the deeper level at all, but is rather a point at which many different motives may be brought to bear on a certain type of situation. Its remarkable constancy and generality is not a result of a corresponding uniformity in ‘human nature’ such as egoism or hedonism, but of certain features of the structure of social systems of action which, however, are not entirely constant but subject to institutional variation”.
That economic motivation is not entirely autonomous, and that it is subject to various other cultural factors will be evident from the following illustration. Both a medical practitioner and a businessman aim at earning as much as they can. But a medical practitioner cannot flaunt such an economic objective openly in the way a businessman does.
The reason is not far to seek. The society expects a doctor to be altruistic in his aim and not make economic gain the summum bonum of his life. There is no such cultural inhibition upon a businessman. The only inhibition upon him is that he must conduct business in a legitimate fashion. A powerful society can enforce these norms very strictly.
The issue can be examined from another angle. Since childhood, we are exposed to various prescriptive and proscriptive social norms through process of socialisation, and our thinking and conduct are conditioned accordingly. Even if the society fails, for some reason or other, to enforce its norms, the members of society follow some of those norms, more or less, as a matter of habit.
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In our example a doctor will feel the pricks of his conscience to say, even in his close circle, that earning, and not service, is his primary goal. Similar is the case with teachers.
We may quote Talcott Parsons again on this point:
“We should bear in mind that economic activity takes place within the ‘institutional’ framework of a society, and that economic behaviour is therefore a phase of institutional behaviour. Deeper moral sentiments are inculcated in early childhood and are deeply built into the structure of personality itself. They are, in the deeper senses, beyond the range of conscious decision and control, except perhaps, in certain critical situations, and even when consciously repudiated, still continue to exert their influence through repressed guilt feelings and the like. In situations of strain these may well come to be in radical opposition to the self-interested impulses of the actor, he is the victim of difficult conflicts and problems of conscience. But there is evidence of a strong tendency, the more that people are integrated with in institutional system, for these normal sentiments to be closely integrated with the self-interested elements”.
We may refer, in passing, to the attempt made by Vilfredo Pareto to deal with the problem of human motivation with a view to emphasizing the complexities involved in an analysis of human motives.
Pareto observed that the actual motivations are sometimes “obscured by all sorts of unsound reasoning’s and misleading explanations”. That is, human beings tend to give logical explanation of all sorts of non-logical actions. Pareto names such explanations ‘derivations’.
The idea of Pareto’s ‘derivations’ has often been compared with Freud’s rationalizations.
“As social beings, we are disposed to select socially esteemed reasons for our conduct and present them to others, and also to ourselves, as grounds for our action. We form habits of concealing petty and self-seeking motives under high names, like duty and honour and principle and patriotism. We want to stand well in the sight of others and in our own eyes”.
We shall, therefore, not be far wrong in concluding that of all quests, none is more complex than the adequate understanding of motivation. The quest must, nevertheless, continue in order to shed light on the nature of social behaviour of man.