You Know What You Want. But Do You Know Why?
Ask someone what they want, and you will usually get a perfectly reasonable answer.
“I want a promotion.”
“I want to earn more money.”
“I want a better relationship.”
“I want to leave this job.”
“I want people to take me seriously.”
The answer may be completely true, but it's likely only the first layer.
Human beings are remarkably good at explaining what we want in practical terms. We are often less good at recognising why that particular thing matters so much to us.
A promotion is a job title. Money is a means of exchange. A bigger house is a collection of rooms. Yet these things can carry emotional weight far beyond their practical value.
Beneath the stated want usually sits another question, namely, “What psychological need do I believe this will satisfy”?
One useful way to explore that question is to consider ten recurring human drives: fear, scarcity, status, belonging, control, novelty, validation, comfort, mating, and meaning.
We should not mistake these ten drives for a scientifically established taxonomy of human motivation. Psychology offers several well-supported theories of motivation, and researchers still debate how to classify our motives.
The ten drives are therefore not a law, but rather a useful lens that can assist us in answering a deceptively simple question: “What is this person really trying to get, protect, prove, avoid or feel”?
Fear
Fear is one of our oldest motivational systems.
Our brains pay extraordinary attention to threat, whether physical, social, or imagined. Neuroscience shows that the systems that detect and respond to threats can operate separately from the conscious feeling we call fear.
In modern life, the threat is rarely a predator waiting in the grass. It may be redundancy, rejection, humiliation, losing money, disappointing a partner or looking incompetent in front of colleagues.
Fear also changes priorities; for example, opportunity can suddenly matter less than protection.
A manager who resists a new system may not simply be “negative”. She may fear becoming less competent in a world she currently understands. An executive who hoards information may fear becoming dispensable. Someone who refuses an attractive career opportunity may value their current security more than the potential upside.
Whenever behaviour seems unusually defensive, fear deserves a place on the list of possible explanations.
Scarcity
Scarcity is closely related to fear, but it has its own flavour. It begins when we believe something valuable is limited, such as time, money, or opportunity.
Research by Anuj Shah, Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir found that scarcity can capture our attention so strongly that we focus intensely on the immediate shortage while neglecting other considerations.
Scarcity narrows the field, which helps explain why phrases such as “last chance”, “only three remaining”, and “offer ends tonight” have become staples of marketing.
The same psychology appears at work.
When employees believe promotions are scarce, colleagues can become competitors. When a company announces restructuring, previously cooperative people may begin protecting territory. When somebody believes time is running out to achieve an important life goal, decisions that once seemed irrational can suddenly become tempting.
Scarcity does more than make us want more. It changes what captures our attention and can alter the way we make decisions.
Status
Human beings organise themselves into hierarchies with astonishing ease.
We notice who has influence, who receives respect, who gets invited into the room and whose opinion carries weight.
Status does not necessarily equate to money or formal power. Cameron Anderson and colleagues describe it more in terms of the respect, admiration, and voluntary deference others grant us.
Look around almost any workplace, and you will see its symbols.
Job titles. Office size. Reporting lines. Executive parking. Who presents to the board. Who flies business class. Who gets copied on the important email.
Many things we call ambition genuinely involve contribution and achievement. Some also reflect our desire for evidence that we matter within the hierarchy.
We may find that distinction easier to recognise in other people than in ourselves.
Belonging
Few psychological needs have stronger empirical support than belonging.
Roy Baumeister and Mark Leary’s landmark review argued that human beings have a powerful, pervasive need to form and maintain meaningful interpersonal bonds.
This makes evolutionary sense, since for most of human history, exclusion from the group carried real consequences.
The modern office has changed the setting, but perhaps not the psychology.
We still want to know whether we belong.
People join companies, communities, religions, and clubs partly because identity is social, and belonging carries enormous power: our people, our team, our culture, our tribe.
It also helps explain why exclusion can hurt disproportionately.
Being left out of a meeting may objectively amount to little more than a diary decision. The person excluded may experience it quite differently. To them, it may signal where they stand within the group. Recognise that sometimes people are just fighting for a place at the table.
Control
Many people cope poorly with prolonged helplessness. We want to believe that our actions influence what happens next.
Self-determination theory, developed by Richard Ryan and Edward Deci, identifies autonomy as one of three basic psychological needs, alongside competence and relatedness.
Autonomy concerns our experience of volition and agency. Control becomes particularly attractive when life feels uncertain.
That is when systems, plans, routines, experts and even questionable promises of “secret knowledge” can become seductive. They offer the possibility of making uncertainty manageable.
At work, the need for control may explain why an employee fights fiercely over what seems like a relatively minor change in responsibility. The task itself may be trivial.
The perceived loss of agency may not be.
We sometimes think people are resisting change when they are actually resisting powerlessness.
Novelty
We are creatures of habit, but we also gravitate toward novelty.
Research by Nico Bunzeck and Emrah Düzel found that novel stimuli activate regions associated with the brain’s dopaminergic system and may enhance learning.
Novelty captures our attention because it interrupts familiarity.
It helps explain the pull of new technology, new relationships, new jobs, new ideas and new destinations. It also explains why some people become restless in roles that others would find comfortably stable.
An employee who changes jobs every two years may not necessarily lack loyalty. An entrepreneur who launches another venture before the previous one matures may not simply lack discipline. Novelty itself may form part of the reward in both cases.
Of course, novelty has a shadow side. We can start viewing the new as better simply because it is new. Many of us have probably made that mistake.
Validation
Validation is the desire to be seen and recognised as worthwhile, capable, attractive, intelligent or important.
Mark Leary and colleagues’ sociometer theory offers an interesting way of understanding this. Their research suggests that self-esteem partly operates as a monitor of social acceptance. When people believe that others value them less, their self-esteem can decline, and their behaviour may shift in an attempt to restore acceptance.
That gives validation a deeply social quality.
Consider the employee who repeatedly reminds everyone of past achievements.
It is easy to label the behaviour as ego. Sometimes it probably is.
Sometimes the person may be asking a quieter question: “Do you see what I contribute”?
Recognition programmes, praise, performance ratings, qualifications, awards and public acknowledgement all speak to this drive. Their power comes from more than the certificate hanging on the wall.
Comfort
Comfort is the desire to reduce friction.
We tend to like convenience, predictability and relief. We prefer the familiar route, the easier process and the decision that removes uncertainty.
Research on effort reveals an interesting tension. People generally experience effort as costly and tend to avoid unnecessary effort. At the same time, we can value outcomes more precisely because we worked hard to achieve them.
Human beings therefore seek comfort, but we do not necessarily thrive in a life completely stripped of challenge.
In organisations, comfort can masquerade as rationality. “We have always done it this way” may contain a legitimate operational argument, but it may also reflect the psychological cost of learning something unfamiliar.
Comfort becomes more problematic when we make immediate relief our main rule for decision-making. Sometimes discomfort is telling us to stop. Sometimes it is simply the price of growth.
Mating
The word may sound oddly biological in a discussion about careers and organisations, but attraction and mate selection have shaped human behaviour for a very long time.
David Buss’s large cross-cultural research into mate preferences found both recurring patterns and important cultural differences in the characteristics people value in potential partners.
Human beings signal attractiveness in many ways. Those signals can include appearance, resources, competence, ambition and status.
It does not mean every sports car, promotion, gym membership or expensive watch is secretly about sex. Reducing complex human behaviour that far would turn psychology into caricature.
It does, however, mean that some behaviour makes more sense when we remember that human beings are signalling creatures. We care about how potential partners and competitors see us, sometimes more than we consciously acknowledge.
Meaning
Eventually, the other drives can leave someone with everything they thought they wanted and one uncomfortable question: “What is all this for”?
Research into meaning in life commonly distinguishes three components: coherence, purpose and significance.
In simple terms, we want life to make sense. We want it to be going somewhere. And we want to feel that it matters.
Meaning helps explain why people sometimes accept lower pay for work they believe is important. It helps explain commitment to causes, professions, faith, family and service. It may also explain why some highly successful people change direction after decades of achievement.
The Same Want But Different Motives
Imagine a world where six employees compete for the same promotion.
The first one wants the title because it signals status. The second wants decision-making authority and therefore seeks control. The third wants the appointment because it would finally prove that she is good enough. Here, validation is doing much of the work.
The fourth wants the increased salary because financial pressure has activated his scarcity and comfort drive. The fifth feels bored and wants a larger, more complex role. Here, the desire for novelty is pushing him forward.
The sixth genuinely wants to shape the organisation and leave something worthwhile behind. Meaning matters most.
From the outside, their behaviour may look almost identical.
Internally, they are pursuing very different psychological rewards. It is why we misunderstand motivation so easily. We respond to the stated request while missing the underlying motivation.
Another complication is that drives rarely operate alone.
The executive pursuing a promotion may simultaneously want status, greater control, more money and reassurance that the organisation values them.
Someone considering retirement may feel drawn toward comfort while fearing a loss of status, belonging and meaning.
A person entering a new relationship may experience novelty, validation, belonging and mating incentives all at once.
The better question is therefore seldom, “Which drive explains this person?” Ask instead: “Which drive appears strongest in this situation”?
Use the Model With Curiosity, Not Certainty
There is an obvious danger in frameworks such as this. Once we learn them, we start diagnosing everyone.
The truth is, though, that human beings are rarely that simple.
Several drives can operate simultaneously, and the same person can respond very differently as circumstances change. A confident executive may become strongly fear-driven during a restructuring. Someone who normally values security may suddenly pursue novelty after years of stagnation. A person motivated by meaning may still enjoy status and recognition when they receive it.
Context matters. History matters. Personality matters.
And we do not always understand our own motives as well as we think. That is why these ten drives work better as questions than as labels.
When you are trying to understand someone’s behaviour, ask:
What does this person believe they will gain if they get what they want?
What are they frightened of losing?
What would success prove to them?
Whose approval matters?
Where do they feel powerless?
What uncertainty are they trying to remove?
What would make this worthwhile?
You can ask yourself the same questions. It is easy to spot status-seeking in somebody else and considerably harder to recognise it in ourselves.
Until next time, remember that we can all become unreliable narrators of our own motives. So pausing briefly to ask yourself these questions may help you see the underlying drives.
In turn, this creates a small gap between impulse and decision, and within that gap lies something valuable: choice.
Dion Le Roux
References
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