Motivation and Emotion, VoL 11, No. 3, 1987

Book Review Human Motivation. David C. McClelland. Glenview, IL, Scott Foresman. Advances in Motivation and Achievement: Volume 3: The Development of Achievement Motivation. John Nicholls (Editor). Greenwich, Connecticut: JAI Press. RE-COGNIZING ACHIEVEMENT MOTIVATION McClelland's weighty tome (663 pages, 15 chapters) offers no surprises to anyone who has even a superficial acquaintance with his long and honored career in American psychology. The work stands as a classic example of dedication to mid-20th century canons of science in psychology. Following a course he set early in his career, McClelland continues to present acceptable evidence that his measurement procedures satisfy the demands of mechanistic logic and of solid measurement theory. He carefully presents the details of studies that provide the basis for his claims about the expressions and the correlates of the motive dispositions that he has identified. He has no difficulty filling the pages of the book, since his work and his-formulations have earned widespread respect, and he now has available an immense literature based on models that have been explicated by him and his co-workers and colleagues. Above all, the writing in this book reveals the kind of world view that led to the particular metaphors and perspectives that were promulgated among mid-century psychologists who were attempting to find a way to organize data and propositions about functioning persons- a strong emphasis on temporally ordered cause-and-effect relationships that were strengthened by shifts and tranfers of energies. Had this book appeared in 1967, we would guess that most reviewers would have found it easy to write a largely laudatory review. At that time it would have been easier to accept the basis from which McClelland derives the models of motive dispositions that he attempts to validate in this book, and the book would have served as a masterful compendium of propositions and clarifying statements. It is worth noting that in the year 1967 there appeared the first volume of the Academic Press series The Psychology of Learning and Motivation (Spence & Taylor, 1%7). The first volume could be taken as a marker in a tremendous transition that has overtaken psychology. Two of its five chapters focused on concepts like reward, extinction, avoidance, and in323 0146-7239/87/0900-0323505.fj0/0 © 1987 Plenum Publishing Corporation

324

Book Review

centive. Two of the book's five chapters treat memory and recall in terms of the organization that persons place on input. The 19th volume of the series (Bower, 1985) contains six chapters, every one of which contains references to internal representational system and to concepts by which to explain the origins and workings of such systems. Readers of chapters like those in this last volume might find if difficult to accept the presumptions on which McCelland built his conceptualizations. From a skeptical position, the material in McCelland's book might stand as a loose collection of disconnected statements that lend little clarity to the task of explaining why humans appear to engage in or to diverge from an apparently consistent course of behavior. Let us first note that the book reveals no clear effort to specify, explicate, and delimit the assumptive structure that underlies the work. Additionally, one must engage in a major conceptual wrestling match in order to extract definitions on which the author would stand. Thus, one must struggle to locate the bases of the aversive reactions that the book might generate in some readers. A very large-sized review could result from making a pointby-point (and unnecessary) demonstration of the elusive assumptive bases of this work. We give only several briefly outlined examples of a tortuous tracking of assumptions. Consider first one of McClelland's specifications of the concept he wishes to evoke by using the term motive. Among other things, he says, "The term motive.., is reserved for instances in which important learning has taken place in connection with the affect associated with natural incentives" (p. 132). He also states, "Thus, a motive may be defined briefly as a learned, affectively charged anticipatory goal state aroused by various cues" (p. 132). Then, "A motive activates the organism to learn the instrumental responses necessary to bring about the goal state" (p. 132). One might conclude, then, that a motive is to be regarded as a learned something. And, a motive, in turn, activates the organism to learn. Having found these specifications, we now are inclined to ask, "What activated the organism to learn the 'learned, affectively charged anticipatory goal states which are aroused by various cues'?" Try as we would, we could not find a statement that offered a clear answer to our question. McClelland appears, however, to invoke the concept of emotion to address this issue-e.g., "These emotions provide much of the energy behind what becomes a learned motive" (p. 132). This might lead one to suspect that emotions are the energizers that solidify the learning of motive dispositions. A clear definition of emotion, however, eludes a reader. In one section, McCletland had used the phrase "affective arousal (or emotions)," then proceeds: "Affective arousal may be thought of as positive or negative in the sense that it either facilitates or inhibits activity intrinsically" (p. 122). However, "Emotions are not motives,

Book Review

325

but they are an important part of motivational systems: they indicate the presence of natural incentives" (p. 128). But what of the idea of "natural incentives"? We gather that, in McClelland's system, natural incentives and emotions participate in each other. Do natural incentivies motivate the learning of learned motives? The clearest definition of the salient term natural incentive appears as an aside: "an innate connection between a sign stimulus and an affective response in the midbrain, which releases an impulse to act in a certain way if certain other conditions occur" (p. 132). One senses the closing in of a loose circle• "Emotions provide much of the energy behind what becomes a learned motive," but "emotions are not motives"; yet a "learned anticipatory goal state" (a motive) does "activate the organism to learn instrumental responses." Incentives seem somehow to be involved, and incentives relate to affect. But special search of the text does not easily uncover a theoretical explanation of incentives and their relations to the acquisition of new responses. As noted above, however, McCleUand does say that "certain sensations are innately pleasant and sought, whereas others are unpleasant and avoided" (p. 110); " . . . there appear to be strong positive and negative natural incentives that influence behavior in important ways" (p. 115). So, it would seem, an incentive should be classed as a motive. But how would an incentive activate a response other than the impulse to which it is innately connected as a sign stimulus? A reader might try to bypass the misgivings about whether or not he or she has a grasp on and accepts McClelland's basic position, and might then go on to search for an internally consistent explanation of specific motive dispositions. Consider the achievement motive. According to McClelland's basic discussion, the achievement motive has a base in the variety incentive. "Small variations from expectancy" is listed as the "sign stimulus" for the variety incentive, the consummatory act of which is "exploratory behavior," and the emotion associated.with the incentive is "interest-surprise"--that is, exploratory behavior stands as the act that is released if mild variety is present• "The occurrence of events that are moderately different from what people expect is pleasing, whereas they react to the too familiar or to the too novel either indifferently or negatively" (p. 142). Let us think of the variety incentive in terms of McClelland's general definition of incentive - "an innate connection.., which releases an impulse to act in a certain way" After having presented the foregoing, McClelland begins his 40-page discussion of the achievement motive by presenting the reader with a surprising rhetorical conundrum: "What is rewarding for the achievement motive ?" (p. 228). Hadn't McClelland given the answer in his 9-page discussion • . .

326

Book Review

of the variety incentive? In his longer discussion of n Achievement, McClelland says that "an achievement incentive is one in which a person gets satisfaction from doing something better for its own sake" (p.229, emphasis his). From where did this come? Why all that prior discussion of small variation from expectancy as incentive for achievement motivation? Let us return to the basic discussion of the variety incentive! "Furthermore, it is not entirely clear how the achievement motive is built on the variety incentive. The problem lies in how the transition is made from liking moderate variations in stimulus situations to liking to produce moderate degrees of variety, as in liking to do something better" (p. 147). So much for all that theory! Let us agree that the incentive for n Achievement is small variation, or doing something better for its own sake, or some such. Then, let us try to understand the origin of individual variations in motive disposition. Hadn't McCleIland led us to believe that incentives are universally available at all times to all p e r s o n s - "an innate connection between a sign stimulus and a response" (p. 132)? We cannot conceptualize the possibility that a relatively unrestrained infant could not avail itself of an infinite variety of opportunities for "doing something better for its own sake": babbling, rhythmically clapping its hands, picking at its toes, overcoming gravity. If innate, and if sign stimuli are constantly available, how would it be possible for parents to arrange for more or less of this incentive (reward)? In a small discussion of the impact incentive, McClelland does speak specifically of the universality of an impact incentive: "While all children start out enjoying having impact," adding that "some parents may strongly discourage this activity, so their child does not develop much pleasure from it or develop a good concept of how to attain pleasures in this way" (p. 173). If pleasure is associated with impact, as a natural incentive, how would parents "discourage" the consumptory acts of "asserting, banging, and so on" (p. 137), which are the consummatory acts for the impact incentive? Shall he tell his readers, or does he expect that we will simply apply a naive concept labeled punishment? If one looks to McClelland's discussion of parental influences affecting the achievement motive, one finds a discussion around the tenuous finding that parental practices of scheduling of feeding and severity of toilet training are associated significantly with variations in n Achievement. In his discussion of the origins of the power motive, McClelland cites a study indicating that a mother's report of high permissiveness for sex and aggression tends to be predictive of her child's expressing high n Power, suggesting that such mothers did not inhibit the functioning of the impact incentive. No explanation is offered, however, to account for the process by which a parent might inhibit the effects of the impact incentive, or of any other incentive. Thus, even if we were to overlook the inconsistencies, gaps, and complications that result from efforts to specify the basic theory underlying

Book Review

327

McClelland's work, we gain little clarity from trying to follow his explanations of specific motive dispositions. Where shall one go? By this point, a reader should be convinced that we have little affinity with theorists who would use mechanistic metaphors, and that we are not made more receptive by studying McCMland's efforts to apply such metaphors. We also believe that important work in psychology has been built around contextualist/constructive models and metaphors. Such metaphors are generally incorporated into the work of those persons who have earned the designation cognitive scientist, as they are included in the current volumes and texts like The Psychology o f Learning and Motivation. One can now find a series of other texts that explicate the concept of person through the application of constructivist approaches, and in such texts we find elaborations of the concept that the psychological systems to which we refer as persons carry out a process of categorizing the self, as a categorizable object. Persons categorize their selves as trustworthy, helpful, loyal, and kind; and such categorizations are translated into motor acts, which produce effects on the environment to validate or invalidate those self-categorizations. Using this general framework, then, one could ask, "How does one come to apply the self-categorization achiever?" Or, one might ask, " H o w does one come to enact the behaviors that she or he construes as relevant to the self-construction affiliater? Such questions, focusing on cognitive processes, would differ radically from asking questions such as "How do we account for the presence of achievement motivation?" or "How does affiliative motivation become a major motive for a person?" And, asking the kinds of questions that we would ask, we would turn to the cognitive sciences for formulations. It is true that McClelland repeatedly speaks of the importance of cognition. But as we study his treatment of cognitive "effects" (p. 473 ff), we are again forced to extract his implicit definition of cognition, and we conclude that whatever McClelland has in mind has little tie to the concepts that we find in extended discussions of cognitive processes: "conscious understanding.., can modify the arousal effect of cues" (p. 478). "Cognitive understandings certainly modify behavior and influence motive arousal, but can it be concluded that a causal attribution pattern defines a motive..." (p. 495). "We must also remember thai cognitive understandings do not predict long-term drifts in behavior the way motives do" (499). Again, are we to conclude that McClelland expects us to retrieve a naive theoretical concept o f cognition (thought) as consciousness: a sort o f talking to oneself? In the volume edited by Nicholls, we also find reference to cognition, and we find questions similar to those we would ask. Nicholls recognizes "doubts about the explanatory value of a single trait-like achievement motive" (p. x) and sets the course toward exploring "age-related change in the cognitive, affective, and situational factors that mediate or direct achieve-

328

Book Review

ment behavior (p. x). In this volume, Roberts reiterates the point that "to fully understand achievement motivation and behavior in all its forms, the function and meaning of behavior to the individual must be taken into account and the goals of action identified. . . . it is necessary to understand the subjective meaning of achievement for an individual before we can truly understand achievement behavior" (p. 259). It is clear that the contributors to this volume have relied heavily on variations of attribution theory, particularly Weiner's (1974) motivation-related version of attribution theory, to gain an understanding of an individual's subjective meaning of achievement. By adopting an attribution model, an investigator, essentially, explores the ways in which one's categorization of self, interacting with his or her categorization of the situation, determines his or her willingness to enter into a situation calling for achievement. In general, the volume contains chapters one age-related changes in children's perception of factors (such as luck, effort, ability, contigency, expectation of success, competence, and control of outcomes) that can cause "success" in their performance of different tasks. Surber, for example, examines the proposition that a person uses reversible causal schemata while construing achievement situations. If the proposition holds, then one should be able to calculate a person's judgment of the level of performance, effort, or ability from knowing his or her judgment of any two of the variables (e.g., judgments of ability, knowing performance and effort judgments, should be calculable). Continuing to follow out an attribution model, Heckhausen studied the ways in which children of varied ages use task difficulty, information about past performance, and the incentive vaIue of completing a task to establish the level of risk they will take in an achievement task. His findings indicate, for example, that there is a developmental progression toward taking greater risk when the incentive value of a task increases. Stipek, in her chapter, reports her studies of the ways in which children use information about past performance, developing the proposition that preschoolers readily use error feedback to set expectancy relative to the performance of others. Only with advancing development, however, do they use such information to categorize their selves in an achievement situation. In the chapter written by Weisz, one finds a discussion of age-related progressions toward understanding contingency. Do young children categorize self as cause? It appears that young children are willing to believe that they are causes, and, in addition, they do not distinguish between contingency in a task requiring skill and in a task in which success is chance-determined. Let us recall the subtitle of this third volume of the series: The Development o f Achievement Motivation. As we read the descriptions of person changes that might be taken as development, we repeatedly returned to a question similar to that which we posed as we read the McClelland text. We ask-

Book Review

329

ed: "What theoretical stance do the writers take as they attempt to explain the developments they describe?" More specifically, what motive process explains these developments? Surely, we are not supposed to believe that these changes occur as the result of biological changes that "reel out" the psychological changes. We found little in this book to answer such questions, and one should not be surprised at the lack. The contributors do n o t - a s we think they should-explicitly relate their work to the body of research into classification and categorization process. It is that w o r k - w o r k on prototypes, fuzzy sets, feature analysis, category formation, and so f o r t h - t h a t will provide the basic groundwork theory for explanations of how a person puts his or her self into the category achiever. In short, the work in this book reflects the remnants of midcentury logical positivism. One after another local theory becomes the guide for collecting one after another local data set, which becomes the validation for one after another local truth. With these valuable local data, one might attempt to erect a theoretical superstructure that can provide a framework for understanding the processes by which one categorizes oneself as competent in a given context. The logical positivists have long since lost their stranglehold on our disciplines. We believe that our discipline is now ready for a turnaround. We now can abandon the search for explanations of motives as traits- a conceptualization that was the legacy of the naive psychology that preceded our efforts at formalizing the study of psychic processes. We also should be in a position to abandon the mechanistic metaphors by which psychologists had hoped to gain scientific credibility. Instead, we would look for motivation principles that would fit with current cognitive theories. One chapter in this text - that written by Schneider- works toward such a motivational principle. Schneider explicates, and then conducts studies to demonstrate, the utility of the principle that children are motivated to create and to resolve subjective uncertainty relative to their competence in performing tasks. Roberts alludes to a similar principle. Children are motivated to enact behaviors that will bring validation of their having acted in accord with the self-standard they had established. "Clearly, the essential element of this conceptualization is the achievement goal of the individual . . . . Once the goals of behavior have been identified, then the behavior of the individual in attempting to obtain goals becomes understandable" (p. 260). Paradoxically, McClelland and his co-workers (McClelland, Atkinson, Clark, & Lowell, 1953) long ago explored a principle that, in altered form, appears to have most promise of bringing work like that of Schneider and Roberts into meaningful proximity with the principles emerging from cognitive science. McClelland noted that that work was related to "the general principle that moderate discrepancies from adaptation level would be found to be pleasing or rewarding, whereas large discrepancies would be unplea-

330

Book Review

sant and be avoided" (p. 139). We take such work as support of the proposition that psychological processes are channelized by people's efforts to regulate the discrepancy between a created construction (a cognitive organization, anticipatory schemata, etc.) and the continued flow of input to the person's sensory endings, Whatever the principle that investigators eventually adopt to guide their study o f motivation, we know that even a small amount of successful attention to the necessity for developing a set o f propositions that attach to well-organized theory will dispel the diffusion and isolation that one confronts in these texts. The directions seem c l e a r - a w a y from mechanism, toward cognitive conceptualizations, and toward motivation principles that fit with such conceptualizations. We should, nevertheless, give our thanks to the giants of midcentury psychology who served us well by having given investigators the opportunity to exhaust the possibilities o f their mechanistic paradigms. James C. Mancuso Michael F. Mascoto State University o f N e w York at A l b a n y

REFERENCES Bower, G. H. (Ed.). (1985). The psychology of learning and motivation (Vol. 19). New York: Academic Press. Spence, K. W., & Spence, J. T. (1967). The psychology of learning and motivation, Vol. 1. New York: Academic Press. McClelland, D. C., Atkinson, J. W,, Clark, R. A., & Lowell,E. L. (1953). The achievement motive. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts. Weiner, B. (1974). Achievement motivation and attribution theory. Morristown, NJ: General Learning Press.