Conscious And Unconscious Motivation

Unconscious motivation - According to Sigmund Freud’s theories of human behavior, he asserts that most of human behavior is as a result of desires, impulses, and memories that have been repressed into an unconscious state, but control human actions.

He believed that our minds consists of a tiny conscious part that is always available for direct observation and subconscious part that is responsible for determining human behavior. For example when someone displays negative attitude towards something, he/she is always expressing his unconscious feelings of dislike.

On the other hand Freud said that repressed memories and desires are the major cause of mental disorders and that people who suffer from this, must be assisted to bring back their conscious thoughts. Research has shown that task performance is affected by motivation. By providing performance incentives it decreases the estimate of unconscious processes (Philiph M.Merikle:94-113, 1999).

Process dissociation has shown that when performing a task following exclusion instructions, one is not supposed to use perceived or remembered information in their responses. Performance here is determined by a number of times participant fail to comply This can clearly explain how unconscious people behaves.

According to Maslow, unconscious motives and behaviors can be complicated to ones life and to prevent this, it is always important to realize that unconscious motives exists and know how to control them. Psychoanalysis has shown that some people, for example in work place may be performing poorly than others because they posses unconscious feeling of aggression towards authority figures in their work place.



 Conscious motivation - Being conscious is to be aware of ones environment and existence, thoughts and sensation.-on the other hand conscious motivation is relatively different from unconscious motivation. New studies by neuroscientists, philosophers and psychologists studied to try and understand emotion and its contribution to the functioning of consciousness.

When we are conscious about something we are able to get into a position where we can solve our problem and at the sane time come up with a better solution (TroyA.W 96-116).

Process dissociation procedure that has been used to experiment the effect of motivation in both conscious and unconscious processes to task performance, has clearly shown that, when provided with incentives, the results for the perception task indicated that incentives increased the participants' ability to exclude previously presented information, which in turn both increased the estimate of conscious processes (Ernest R. Hilgard, 90-113)

Performance in conscious motivation is measured by giving out inclusive instructions; participants are asked to use their perceived or remembered information to give out their results. Performance is measured by a number of times they comply with instructions.

From the findings of both conscious and unconscious motivation it can be concluded that process dissociation procedure is relatively immune to influences of motivation when used with a memory task. Behavior orientation is one of the defining characteristic of human beings.

From the research on conscious and unconscious motivation it has been indicated how psychological mechanisms are involved in the planning and execution of motivated social behavior (Kipling D. Williams, social motivation, 34-45).


About the Author 

LindaMiller The author has academic writing experience of over ten years. She holds a PHD in education from Harvard.