Motivation and Volition in the Course of Action

Free Will, Causality, and Neuroscience, 2019

This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC-BY-NC 4.0 License.

Throughout their lifespan, agentic individuals consistently update their understandings of situational and environmental contexts and frequently deconstruct and reconstruct their actions as well as the consequences of their actions that arose within these contexts. This chapter overviews action-control beliefs and Action-Control Theory. Action-control beliefs involve three general beliefs that reflect the relationship between the three components of an action sequence: control expectancy, which refers to the relation between agent and ends, meaning that individual’s expectancy about their capability to achieve a given goal or end; means-ends beliefs, which represent the relation between means and ends; and agency beliefs, refer to an individual’s beliefs of what means they are capable of utilizing when the self acts as an agent.

1994

The control of goal-directed, instrumental actions by primary motivational states, such as hunger and thirst, is mediated by two processes . The first is engaged by the Pavlovian association between contextual or discriminative stimuli and the outcome or reinforcer presented during instrumental training . Such stimuli exert a motivational influence on instrumental performance that depends upon the relevance of the associated outcome to the current motivational state of the agent . Moreover, the motivational effects of these stimuli operate in the absence of prior experience with the outcome under the relevant motivational state . The second, instrumental, process is mediated by knowledge of the contingency between the action and its outcome and controls the value assigned to this outcome . In contrast to the Pavlovian process, motivational states do not influence the instrumental process directly ; rather, the agent has to learn about the value of an outcome in a given motivational state by exposure to it while in that state . This incentive learning is similar in certain respects to the acquisition of "cathexes" envisaged by .

The Faculty of Action (preprint), 2019

The human faculty of action, understood as a physical and mental capacity to perform conscious actions and participate in collective activity, is formulated and analyzed in this paper within the framework of activity theory and is complemented with neurobiological evidence. The paper starts out from the observation that the innate abilities underpinning the faculty of action were originally developed in the course of biocultural evolution. In agreement with the foundational ideas of activity theory, the main instrument of analysis of the faculty of action is defined in this work as an 'action-thought', an elementary unit of activity and actional thinking. Action-thoughts both guide and represent actions and are also employed in their mental rehearsal as well as in decision-making. The faculty of actions appears at the highest level in the hierarchy of motion control as originally outlined by N. A. Bernstein. This hierarchy, the paper argues, must be amended and completed with the addition of one further level of external action control, which characterizes the individual's ability to act collectively by means of commanding/obeying. In closing, the primary role of actions in languaging is discussed, as well as the action-based generation of meaning and language acquisition.

Why is it that (as Bratman has pointed out) when one deliberates about the future, one’s focus is on what to do in the future, not on what to intend now? I argue that the concept of intention includes a standard of correctness pertaining to the desirability of the intended action rather than the desirability of the intention itself. Uncovering this feature of intention is the key to solving the toxin puzzle.

Frontiers in Psychology, 2019

According to many criteria, agency, intentionality, responsibility and freedom of decision, require conscious decisions. Freud already assumed that many of our decisions are influenced by dynamically unconscious motives or that we even perform unconscious actions based on completely unconscious considerations. Such actions might not be intentional, and perhaps not even actions in the narrow sense, we would not be responsible for them and freedom of decision would be missing. Recent psychological and neurophysiological research has added to this a number of phenomena (the "new unconscious") in which behavior is completely unconscious or in which the decision or its execution is influenced by unconscious factors: priming, automatic behavior, habitualized behavior, actions based on plain unconscious deliberations, intrusion of information from the dorsal pathway, etc. However, since this makes up the largest part of the behavior which is generally regarded as action, intentionality, yet agency, responsibility and even compatibilist freedom of decision for the largest part of our behavior may be threatened. Such considerations have led to a lively debate, which, however, suffers from generalizations that lump all these unconscious phenomena together. In contrast, the aim of this article is to discuss individual unconscious influences on our behavior separately with respect to what extent they require changes in traditional conceptualizations. The first part (sections 2-4) of the article outlines the "traditions" and their elaborations: the intentional causalist concept of action, an associated empirical theory of action and standard concepts of responsibility and compatibilist freedom of decision, as well as the challenges for them. In the second part (sections 5-9), the aforementioned unconscious influences on our actions (except for automated and habitualized actions, which I discuss elsewhere) are examined: 1. unconscious priming, 2. dynamically unconscious motives, 3. dorsal pathway information influencing conscious decisions, 4. unconsciously altered execution of conscious intentions, and 5. unconscious deliberations and decisions. To what extent do these phenomena C1. require a change in the concept of action, C2. curtail intentionality or agency, C3. responsibility, and C4. freedom? The result is: The curtailments prove to be far less dramatic than they initially appear; they require more watchfulness but no conceptual change.

World Congress of Philosophy , 1998

There are two distinctions of orientation or of intention of a subject toward any phenomenon: "to" or "from" it, attraction or repulsion, acceptance or rejection. The +/-acceptability or pleasantness/unpleasantness of a phenomenon to a subject is the term indicating his or her +/-orientation to the perceived phenomenon. There are six components of the stream of human consciousness: contact senses (smell, taste, tactile senses), distant senses (auditory, visual) and emotions. Only four of them (the three contact senses and emotions) possess their own acceptability or pleasantness. Pleasantness of Condition of a Subject (PCS) is a sum or an integral of acceptabilities of these four components. "Happiness" is the upper limit of the maximization of PCS; a subject is constantly striving to maximize PCS or to reach for happiness. An attitude of a subject to a phenomenon in the center of his or her attention is determined by the synchronous PCS. Belief/disbelief is a verbalized positive/negative attitude. Desire of a phenomenon x is a change of PCS (∆PCS x) created by the act of perceiving/imagining the phenomenon; the strength of desire is the magnitude of this change |∆PCS x |. Desire of a phenomenon characterizes power of the PCS maximization possessed by this phenomenon. Need is a periodic desire; the desire correspondent to need is a concrete form of existence of this need. Choice is determined by comparative strength of the desirabilities of the competing elements of choice; it includes choice of the phenomena to perceive or attend. The attention of a subject toward a perceived phenomenon x is proportional to the strength of its desirability: ATTx=k|∆PCS x | = k|DESIRE x |. The distribution of attention is a function of the desirabilities of (n) phenomena perceived at the time (t): ATTtotal t =k|DES1 t |+k|DES2 t |+…+|DESn t |. Will is an ability of the subject to influence the balance of desirabilities of elements of the subject's choice in the predetermined way. The nature of the will's effort is a self-inducement of suitable emotions through activation of memories by the concentration of the subject's attention to them.

Current Directions in Psychological Science, 2011

Since the 1970s, researchers on motivation and behavior have taken the stance that important human behaviors are determined by specific attitudes, intentions, and goals. In the present article, we review evidence suggesting that, in addition to specific motivational constructs, general goals of action and inaction are also vital determinants of many important human behaviors. This research examines the effects of these goals on motor behavior, cognitive performance, and political participation. Furthermore, we connect these general action and inaction goals with other important areas in psychology, including affect, approach/avoidance, energization, material resources, mindsets, and power. Finally, we conclude with a discussion of individual and regional/cultural differences in action and inaction. Overall, general goals for action and inaction are shown to influence a vast array of important behaviors, suggesting that in addition to considering specific attitudes, intentions, and goals, researchers may gain important insight into human behavior by considering general motivations.

The present article discusses the concepts of having a goal and of goal-directed behavior from a behavior-analytic perspective. In clinical psychology as well as in the study of human behavior at large, goals delineate an important area of investigation when it comes to health, well-being, and behavioral change. While concepts like goals and goal-directed behavior may be more frequently used outside the theoretical boundaries of behavior analysis, we argue that by incorporating recent behavior analytic research on verbal behavior, new and fruitful ways open up for approaching the phenomenon of having a goal. A behavior-analytic approach thereby may increase both precision in understanding and the potential for influencing essential aspects of human behavior. This analysis starts with the concept of rule-governed behavior and develops that analysis by using the concept of derived relational responding.

European Journal of Social Psychology, 2012

The cohesiveness of a society depends, in part, on how its individual members manage their daily activities with respect to the goals of that society. Hence, there should be a degree of social agreement on what constitutes action and what constitutes inaction. The present research investigated the structure of action and inaction definitions, the evaluation of action versus inaction, and individual differences in these evaluations. Action-inaction ratings of behaviors and states showed more social agreement at the ends of the inaction-action continuum than at the middle, suggesting a socially shared construal of this definition. Action-inaction ratings were also shown to correlate with the valence of the rated behaviors, such that the more active the behavior the more positive its valence. Lastly, individual differences in locomotion, need for closure, and Christian religious beliefs correlated positively with a preference for action.