This Blog was written by Prof. Steven Reiss and localized by Bahar Sen.
It is pointless to try to motivate someone based on values that the other person does not have. Yet people try to do it all the time because of theSelf-Hugging approach. Self-Huggingis the tendency to think that one's own values are the best for other people.
But to motivate someone else, you have to appeal to their values. This may seem easy to do, but it is not so easy. We often try to motivate others by dictating our own values rather than appealing to their values. A classic example of this is the soccer coach who tells his team that the next match will be a test of their character. We evaluate thousands of athletes and find that athletes, as a close and similar class, are not so obsessed with character.We asked athletes, anonymously,to rate "I agree/disagree" with the statement "I try to behave in accordance with the Code of Conduct ." Most of them answered "disagree". So it makes no sense for the coach (or anyone else) to try to motivate players by appealing to values they don't have.
People have a natural tendency to think that their values are the best not only for themselves but also for everyone else. When people discover how great winning makes them feel, they think they have learned something about human nature (that winning feels great for every human being). But what they have really learned is something about themselves. While there are a large number of people among us who are motivated to win, and competitive people like to win, many people also don't like to score and are therefore not motivated to compete.
We have a tendency to motivate other people by constantly inculcating our own values in them. Some teachers, for example, believe that everyone is born intellectually curious. Faced with substantial evidence that some students are not interested in intellectual pursuits, these educators try to teach these students the pleasures of intellectual life. Instead of appealing to students' values, they try to inculcate their own. And that doesn't work very well either.
Some ambitious parents try to motivate their callous adolescents by telling them "how important it is to succeed in life". But many callous adolescents are not interested in success; if they were, they would not be so comfortable with a callous lifestyle. Instead, most of them value the balance between fun and work/life. If you push them too hard, they give up altogether.
Some employers use bonuses to motivate their employees. Yes, some employees may be motivated by extra money. But some people are motivated by the need to feel competent, others by the need to feel that they are contributing to society. In other words, the way for a person to be motivated at work is to match their work with their values and tofind meaning in their work .
My colleagues and I have surveyed over 80000 people in North America, Europe and Asia. In our research we have worked with students in the United States, employees in Europe and senior executives in large corporations. We have spent almost 20 years gathering evidence of 16 psychological needs that are common to all of us and deeply rooted in human nature. These needs are approval, curiosity, eating, family, honor, idealism, independence, order, physical activity, power, romance, thrift, social contact, status, peace of mind and revenge. All human motives boil down to these 16 needs or a combination of them.
DOWNLOAD THE LIST OF 16 BASIC HUMAN NEEDS
Psychologists doing scientific work have finally started to try to understand motivation and to ask: what is motivation? From the beginning, my colleagues and I, to understand people, have been asking them directly: "What are your goals? What are you trying to achieve?" Surprisingly, many psychologists don't ask these questions because they assume that conscious motives are superficial. Instead, they ask, "What happened to you in your childhood? How do you feel about your parents?" and look for the answer subconsciously.
In summary, in our research we found that people are motivated when they put their values into practice. Our advice at the end of this scientifically proven research: "If you want to motivate a loved one, a student or an employee, the smartest approach is to focus on what that person cares about. This is possible by understanding the motivational profile of that person.
Prof. Dr. Steven Reiss
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