Ancestral Environments and Motivated Social Perception: Goal-Like Blasts From the Evolutionary Past

The word motivation has multiple meanings in the psychological sciences. Even in the narrower context of social perception and social behavior, the tenn is used in several very different ways. Sometimes the word implies the entire broad category of unspecified processes that supply answers 10 "Why do we do what we doT' questions of the sort posed by William James in the quote above. When used in this way, motivation refers not to any psychologically meaningful construct, but instead to a broad domain of inquiry.