The 3 Motivation Categories
Motivation is often split into three categories in psychology. These three categories are activation, persistence, and intensity. These depict the degree and the process in which people are motivated. The activation refers to the process of initially deciding something. For example, running a kilometre to get fit, or walking to the fridge because you’re hungry. Persistence refers to how long this action is then carried out for. For example, whether someone only runs for a day and gives up, or they run every day for the next month. It describes how long a person spends on an action.
The intensity of motivation refers to how much effort is put into doing something. For example, a teenager might do the homework people their teacher tells them to. However, they may have just done the bare minimum and left it that. On the other hand, another student may have done the homework because they were interested in it and done the work much more thoroughly. In this case, there is a difference in the intensity of motivation. The intensity of motivation is how hard someone works to fulfill that motivation.
Influences on intensity
Of course, the big question then is how to increase your intensity. If you want to increase your own intensity, or you want others to do something with a reasonable amount of effort for you, you’re going to need some way to increase the intensity of their motivation. There are a few factors which influence the level of intensity exerted in any situation, which can be used to get the most out of yourself or other people.
Task Difficulty
One of the ways to manipulate someone’s effort of any task is through the difficulty of the task, or the perceived difficulty. According to Brehm & Self’s (1989) theory of motivational intensity, when people are faced with a task of fixed difficulty, people’s overall effort put into the task will vary based on how difficult the task is. Essentially, the more difficult, the task, the more effort people will put into completing it. This is because people are ‘allocating resources’ to complete a task. People will instictively not spend too much energy on a task, because it’s wasteful. They will typically only do what is necessary. For example, a person will work harder when trying to solve a difficult maths problem than when they are thirsty because one is easier than the other. Because one requires more energy, one therefore requires more effort
In general, when task difficulty is fixed, and people know what the difficulty is, the motivational intensity tends to mirror it. However, when the difficulty of the task is not fixed, then people’s motivational intensity is different. In these cases, such as a ‘do your best’ task, the intesity put into this task is based on the task’s importance, rather than perceived difficulty. If the task is very important or a person has high interest in the topic, they will tend put much more effort in. However, if importance is low and interest is low, people will tend not to put so much effort into this type of task. The difference between tasks of known difficulty and unknown difficulty is also continued in this piece of research.
Potential Reward
The reward received from any given task also has an impact on how much effort people give to a task. This factor tends to connect itself very closely to task difficulty, as part of Brehm & Self’s theory of motivational intensity. Depending on the reward linked to a task, people are more likely to put effort into a task. As expected, when the reward is increased, people will generally have increased effort. When tasks are both low reward and low difficulty, the task will typically be completed, but with low effort put into it. When the reward is increased, people will then complete the task, with more effort, but will not do any extra work.
However, when there is not much reward for a task and the task is difficult, there is a good chance the task my not be done at all, due to the low importance of the task and the difficulty. In these cases, people are not willing to spend the energy to complete the task, because the energy spent is not worth the reward. In the case where there is high reward for a difficult task, this is where people will typically exert the highest amount of effort to complete the task. This is because the task given requires the energy as mentioned earlier, and because the spent energy is worth it in the minds of those doing it.
Emotion
Probably one of the easier concepts to grasp is the idea that someone’s emotion or feelings towards a task can increase of decrease intensity. When someone is personally interested in a task, they will tend to try much harder in completing it, and securing that it goes well. In a piece of research, psychologists found that there was no difference between low-intesity emotions and the overall performance. However, when people felt stronger emotions, such as disgust or interest, they found more significant differences. In the interest condition, people tended to work more slowly, but made less errors, with the intentions of doing better on the exercise. In the disgust condition, they found people made many more errors than those in the anxious condition. The psychologists concluded that stronger emotions resulted in differences in performance
When people are more personally interested in topics, they tend to become more motivated to do it, and will, therefore, be willing to put more effort into making it happen. For example, a person more invested in schoolwork would work harder for a good grade than someone who has no interest. Their personal emotions towards influences how much effort is put into a task. In this way, someone’s intensity or effort is influenced by their emotion. So, one of the best ways to increase your own motivation is to become interested in a topic or feel better about doing them.