ABSTRACT
Motivation is paramount for survival because it directs our behavior to satisfy drives and desires. Without motivation, there can be no behavior, no action. You need to be motivated to find food and water to survive the day, and you need to be sexually motivated to pass on genes, to only mention our physiological drives. In fact, mice that cannot produce dopamine—a brain chemical involved with our ability to want something—just sit there all day and eventually die of hunger because they do not seek out food (Palmiter 2008). Therefore, it has been theorized that cognition, emotion, and social interaction could all have emerged to sustain motivation (see Baumeister 2016). Research on motivation is relatively young, and academic debates are still very vigorous. Countless theories have been proposed to explain human motivation, but a solid meta-analysis is still missing that makes sense of it all. There is no current consensus or a unified theory of human motivation that can account for all our drives and behaviors in a clear mapping. To be honest, it took me quite some time to figure out how I could organize this chapter in order to give a good enough overview about human motivation while trying not to oversimplify things too much. I propose to break down the various and complex 60mechanisms of motivation in the following four types, which all interact with one another (inspired by Lieury 2015):
Implicit motivation and biological drives
Environmental-shaped motivation and learned drives
Intrinsic motivation and cognitive needs
Personality and individual needs
