by Dean Burnett
Maslow’s hierarchy is often presented as a stepped pyramid. At the lowest level are biological requirements such as food, drink, air (someone without air is undeniably very motivated to find some). Then there’s safety, including shelter, personal security, financial security, things that stop you from coming to physical harm. Next is “belonging”; humans are social creatures and need approval, support and affection (or at least interaction) from others. Solitary confinement in prisons is considered a serious punishment for a reason.
Then there’s “esteem,” the need to be not just acknowledged or liked but actually respected by others, and by yourself. People have morals that they value and stick to, and hope others will respect them for. Behavior and actions that can lead to this are therefore a source of motivation. Finally, there’s “self-actualization,” the desire (and therefore motivation) to reach one’s potential. You feel you could be the best painter in the world? Then you will be motivated to become the best painter in the world. Although, since art is subjective, you technically may already be the best painter in the world. Well done, if so.
The idea is that a person would be motivated to meet all the needs of the first level, then the second level, then the third and so on, in order to satisfy all needs and drives and be the best possible person. It’s a nice idea, but the brain isn’t that neat and organized. Many people don’t follow Maslow’s hierarchy; some are motivated to give the last of their money to help strangers in need, or actively put themselves in harm’s way to save an animal in danger (unless it’s a wasp), despite the fact that an animal has no means of respecting or rewarding them for their heroics (especially if it’s a wasp, which will probably sting them and do an evil wasp laugh).
There’s also sex. Sex is a very powerful motivator. For proof of this, see anything ever. Maslow states that sex is at the bottom of the hierarchy of needs, as it’s a primitive, powerful biological drive. But people can live without any sex at all. They might resent doing so, but it’s entirely possible. Also, why do people want sex? A primitive urge for pleasure and/or reproduction, or the desire to be close and intimate with someone? Or maybe it’s because others view sexual prowess as an achievement and deserving of respect? Sex is all over the hierarchy.
Recent research into the workings of the brain provide another approach to understanding motivation. Many scientists draw distinctions between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. Are we being motivated by external factors, or internal ones? External motivations are derived from others. Someone pays you to help them move; that’s an external motivation. You won’t enjoy it, it’s tedious and involves heavy lifting, but you get rewarded financially and so you do it. It could also be more subtle. Say everyone starts wearing yellow cowboy hats for “fashion,” and you want to be trendy, so you buy and wear a yellow cowboy hat. You may have no fondness for yellow cowboy hats, you may think they look stupid, but others have decided otherwise, and so you want one. This is an extrinsic motivation.
Intrinsic motivations are where we’re driven to do things because of decisions or desires that we come up with ourselves. We decide, based on what we’ve experienced and learned, that helping sick people is a noble and rewarding thing to do, so we’re motivated to study medicine and become a doctor. This is an intrinsic motivation. If we are motivated to study medicine because people pay doctors a lot of money, this is more an extrinsic motivation.
Intrinsic and extrinsic motivations exist in a delicate balance. Not only with each other, but within themselves as well. In 1988, Deci and Ryan came up with the self-determination theory, which describes what motivates people in the absence of any external influence, so is 100 percent intrinsic.16 It argues that people are motivated to achieve autonomy (control of things), competency (to be good at things) and relatedness (be recognized for what they do). All of these explain why micromanagers are so infuriating; someone hovering over your shoulder telling you precisely how to do the simplest task robs you of all control, undermines all notion of competence and is often impossible to relate to, given how most micromanagers seem sociopathic (if you’re at the mercy of one).
In 1973, Lepper, Greene and Nisbet pointed out the over-justification effect.17 Groups of children were given colorful art supplies to play with. Some were told they’d be rewarded for using them; others were left to their own devices. A week later, the children who weren’t rewarded were far more motivated to use the art supplies again. Those who decided that the creative activity was enjoyable and satisfying on their own experienced greater motivation than those who received rewards from other people.
It seems if we associate a positive outcome with our own actions, this carries more weight than if the positive outcome came from someone else. Who’s to say they won’t reward us next time? As a result, motivation is diminished.
The obvious conclusion is that rewarding people for a task can actually reduce motivation for doing it, whereas giving them more control or authority increases motivation. This idea has been picked up (with great enthusiasm) by the business world, largely because it lends scientific credibility to the idea that it’s better to give employees greater autonomy and responsibility than actually paying them for their labor. While some researchers suggest that this is accurate, there’s ample data against it. If paying someone to work reduces motivation, then top executives who get paid millions actually do nothing. Nobody is saying that though; even if billionaires aren’t motivated to do anything, they can afford lawyers who are.
The brain’s tendency towards ego can also be a factor. In 1987, Edward Tory Higgins devised the self-discrepancy theory.18 This argued that the brain has a number of “selves.” There’s the “ideal” self, which is what you want to be, derived from your goals, biases and priorities. You may be a stocky computer programmer from Cleveland, but your ideal self is a bronzed volleyball player living on a Caribbean island. This is your ultimate goal, the person you want to be.
Then there’s the “ought” self, which is how you feel you should be behaving in order to achieve the ideal self. Your “ought” self is someone who avoids fatty foods and wasting money, learns volleyball and keeps an eye on Barbados property prices. Both selves provide motivation; the ideal self provides a positive kind of motivation, encouraging us to do things that bring us closer to our ideal. “Ought” self provides more negative, avoidance motivation, to keep us from doing things that take us away from our ideal; you want to order pizza for dinner? That’s not what you ought to do. Back to the salads for you.
Personality also plays a part. When it comes to motivation, someone’s locus of control can be crucial. This is the extent to which someone feels they are in control of events. They might be an egotistical sort who feels the very planet revolves around them, because why wouldn’t it? Or they may be far more passive, feeling they’re always at the mercy of circumstance. Such things may be cultural; people raised in a Western capitalist society, constantly told they can have anything they want, will feel more in control of their own lives, whereas someone living in a totalitarian regime probably won’t.
Feeling like a passive victim of events can be damaging; it can reduce the brain to a state of learned helplessness. People don’t feel they can change their situation, so lack the motivation to try. They don’t attempt to do anything as a result, and things get worse for them due to their inaction. This lowers their optimism and motivation further, so the cycle continues and they end up an ineffectual mess, paralyzed by pessimism and zero motivation. Anyone who’s ever been through a bad break-up can probably relate to this.
Exactly where motivation originates in the brain is unclear. The reward pathway in the midbrain is implicated, along with the amygdala due to the emotional component involved in things that motivate us. Connections to the frontal cortex and other executive areas are also associated as a lot of motivation is based on planning and anticipation of reward. Some even argue that there are two separate motivation systems, the advanced cognitive kind that gives us life goals and ambitions, and the mo
re basic reactive kind that says, “Scary thing, run!” Or, “Look! Cake! Eat it!”
But the brain also has other quirks that produce motivation. In the 1920s, Russian psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik noticed, while sitting in a restaurant, that the waitstaff seemed to be able to remember only the orders they were in the process of dealing with.19 Once the order was completed, they seemed to lose all memory of it. This occurrence was later tested in the lab. Subjects were given simple tasks to do, but some were interrupted before they could complete them. Later assessment revealed that those who were interrupted could remember the tests much better, and even wanted to complete them despite the test being over and there being no reward for doing so.
This all gave rise to what is now known as the Zeigarnik effect, where the brain really doesn’t like things being incomplete. This explains why TV shows use cliff-hangers so often; the unresolved storyline compels people to tune in to the conclusion, just to end the uncertainty.
It seems as if the second best way to motivate a person to do something is to leave it incomplete and restrict their options for resolving it. There is an even more effective way to motivate people, but that will be revealed in my next book.
Is this meant to be funny?
(The weird and unpredictable workings of humor)
“Explaining a joke is like dissecting a frog. You understand it better but the frog dies in the process”—E. L. White. Unfortunately, science is largely about rigorous analysis and explaining things, so this may be why science and humor are often seen as mutually exclusive. Despite this, scientific attempts have been made to investigate the brain’s role in humor. Numerous psychological experiments have been detailed throughout this book: IQ tests, word-recitation tests, elaborate food preparations for appetite/taste, and so on. One of the common properties of these experiments, and countless others used in psychology, is that they all adhere to certain types of manipulations, or “variables” to use the technical term.
Psychology experiments incorporate two types of variables: independent and dependent variables. Independent variables are what the experimenter controls (IQ test for intelligence, word lists for memory analysis, all designed and/or supplied by the researcher); dependent variables are what the experimenter measures, based on how the subjects respond (score on IQ test, number of things remembered, bits of brain that light up and so on).
Independent variables need to be reliable in invoking the desired response, for example, the completion of a test. And here’s where a problem arises; in order to study effectively how humor works in the brain, your subjects need to experience humor. So ideally, you’d need something that everyone, no matter who they are, is guaranteed to find funny. Anyone who can come up with such a thing probably won’t be a scientist for very long, as they’d soon be getting vast sums from television companies desperate to exploit this skill. Professional comedians work for years to achieve this, but there’s never been a comedian that everyone likes.
It gets worse, because surprise is a big element of comedy and humor. People will laugh when they first hear a joke they like, but not so much the second, third, fourth or more times they hear it, because now they know it. So any attempt to repeat the experiment# will need yet another 100 percent reliable way to make people laugh.
There’s also the setting to consider. Most laboratories are very sterile, regulated environments, designed to minimize risks and prevent anything from interfering with experiments. This is great for science, but not for encouraging a state of merriment. And if you’re scanning the brain, it’s even harder; MRI scans, for example, involve being confined in a tight chilly tube while a massive magnet makes very weird noises all around you. This isn’t the best way to put someone in the mood for knock-knock jokes.
But still, a number of scientists haven’t let these fairly considerable obstacles stop them investigating the workings of humor, although they’ve had to adopt some odd strategies. Take Professor Sam Shuster, who looked into the workings of humor and how it differs between groups of people.20 He did this by riding a unicycle in busy public areas of Newcastle, England, and recording the types of reactions this provoked. While an innovative form of research, on a list of potential candidates for things everybody finds amusing, “unicycles” is unlikely to be in the top ten.
There’s also a study by Professor Nancy Bell of Washington State University,21 whereby a deliberately bad joke was regularly dropped into casual conversations, in order to determine the nature of people’s reactions to poor attempts at humor. The joke used was: “What did the big chimney say to the little chimney? Nothing. Chimneys can’t talk.”
The responses ranged from awkward to outright hostile. Overall though, it seems nobody actually liked the joke, so whether this even counts as a study into humor is debatable.
These tests technically look at humor indirectly, via reactions and behavior towards people attempting it. Why do we find things funny? What’s going on in the brain to make us respond to certain occurrences with involuntary laughter? Scientists to philosophers have chewed this over. Nietzsche argued that laughter is a reaction to the sense of existential loneliness and mortality that humans feel, although judging by much of his output Nietzsche wasn’t that familiar with laughter. Sigmund Freud theorized that laughter is caused by the release of “psychic energy,” or tension. This approach has developed and been labeled the “relief ” theory of humor.22 The underlying argument is that the brain senses some form of danger or risk (to ourselves or others), and once it is resolved harmlessly, laughter occurs to release the pent-up tension and reinforce the positive outcome. The “danger” can be physical in nature, or something inexplicable or unpredictable like the twisted logic of a joke scenario, or suppression of responses or desires due to social constraints (offensive or taboo jokes often get a potent laugh, possibly because of this). This theory seems particularly relevant when applied to slapstick; someone slipping on a banana skin and ending up dazed is humorous, whereas someone slipping on a banana skin, cracking their skull and dying is certainly not, because the danger is “real.”
A theory by D. Hayworth in the 1920s builds on this,23 arguing that the actual physical process of laughter evolved as a way for humans to let each other know that the danger has passed and all is well. Where this leaves people who claim to “laugh in the face of danger” is anyone’s guess.
Philosophers as far back as Plato suggested that laughter is an expression of superiority. When someone falls over, or does or says something stupid, this pleases us because they have lowered their status compared with ours. We laugh because we enjoy the feeling of superiority and to emphasize the other person’s failings. This would certainly explain the enjoyment of Schadenfreude, but when you see internationally famous comedians strutting about on stage performing to thousands of laughing people in stadiums, it’s unlikely the entire audience is thinking, “That person is stupid. I am better than them!” So again, this isn’t the whole story.
Most theories concerning humor highlight the role of inconsistency and disrupted expectations. The brain is constantly trying to keep track of what’s going on both externally and internally, in the world around us and inside our heads. To facilitate this, it has a number of systems to make things easier, such as schemas. Schemas are specific ways that our brains think and organize information. Particular schemas are often applied to specific contexts—in a restaurant, at the beach, in a job interview, or when interacting with certain individuals/types of people. We expect these situations to pan out in certain ways and for a limited range of things to transpire. We also have detailed memories and experiences that suggest how things are “meant” to occur in recognizable circumstances and scenarios.
The theory is that humor results when our expectations are violated. A verbal joke uses twisted logic, where events don’t occur as we believe they should. Nobody has ever gone to the doctor because they feel like a pair of curtains. Un-attended horses seldom walk into bars. Humor potentially comes from
being faced with these logical or contextual inconsistencies as they cause uncertainty. The brain isn’t good at uncertainty, especially if it means the systems it uses to construct and predict our world view are potentially flawed (the brain expects something to happen in a certain way, but it doesn’t, which suggests underlying issues with its crucial predictive or analytical functions). Then the inconsistency is resolved or defused by the “punchline,” or equivalent. Why the long face? A horse has a long face, but that’s a question asked to miserable people! It’s wordplay! I understand wordplay! The resolution is a positive sensation for the brain as the inconsistency is neutralized, and maybe something is learned. We signal our approval of resolution via laughter, which also has numerous social benefits.
This also helps explain why surprise is so important, and why a joke is never as funny when repeated; the inconsistency that caused the humor originally is no longer unfamiliar, so the impact is dulled. The brain now remembers this set-up, is aware that it is harmless, so isn’t as affected by it.
Many brain regions have been implicated in the processing of humor, such as the mesolimbic reward pathway, given that it produces the reward of laughter. The hippocampus and amygdala are involved, as we need to have memories of what should happen to have these anticipations thwarted, and strong emotional responses to this occurring. Numerous frontal cortex regions play a role, as much of humor comes from expectations and logic being disrupted, which engage our higher executive functions. There are also parietal lobe regions involved in language processing, as much comedy is drawn from wordplay or violating the norms of speech and delivery.
This language-processing role of humor and comedy is more integral than many may think. Delivery, tone, emphasis, timing, all of these can make or break a joke. A particularly interesting finding concerns the laughing habits of deaf people who communicate via sign language. In a standard vocal conversation where someone tells a joke or a humorous story, people laugh (if it’s funny) during the pauses, at the ends of sentences, basically in the gaps where laughing will not obscure the telling of the joke. This is important because laughter and joke-telling are usually both sound-based. This isn’t the same for sign-language speakers. Someone could laugh throughout a joke or story told via sign language and not obscure anything. But they don’t. Studies show that deaf people laugh at the same pauses and gaps during a signed joke, even if the noise of laughter isn’t a factor.24 Language and speech processing clearly influence when we feel it’s time to laugh, so it’s not necessarily as spontaneous as we think.