Angela Gonzalez
Motivation is the explanation for the decisions or judgments we make in our everyday life; our attitudes towards tasks and simple actions depend on this called motivation. Yet, motivation is a type 1 thinking. Therefore, even when the pattern of our day might be led by how motivated we are while doing something, we donât necessarily realize this (as it is part of our unconscious.) There are two types of motivations, Extrinsic motivation, and Intrinsic motivation. Extrinsic Motivation is when something tangible from the outside gives us the impulse to make a decision. We are given a positive or negative reinforcement that motivates us to do something, either because we want to avoid a punishment or because we are trying to gain something, like for example money. However, intrinsic motivation lead to decisions we make based on our inside feelings and emotions.
Intrinsic motivations are driven by anything that touches our emotions, these motivations are based on how happy a decision makes us. They give us this feeling of  empowerment and self-motivation, itâs the belief that we can accomplish our goals. Thus, there is a possibility, we create visions of where we will be if we succeed. Our mind asks different questions to our unconscious: âdo you believe you can do it? will it work?â but the most important is the motivational question: âis it worth it?â Because behind this decisions there are consequences and we need to have accountability for them. (Scott Geller.) Therefore, if we believe that it is worth doing something, then we will be pushed towards the pursuit of this idea.
Furthermore, as humans, with this motivation we look for a sense of social support and acceptance; which is one of the principal things that move us forward. Yet, it is important to remark that this kind of social support does not involve the reward of a motivation, the decision to do something must come from the individual alone.âWhen you perceive choice you perceive motivation,â (Ellen langer) otherwise motivation is driven away. âHuman beings want to – and in a deeper way need to- feel a sense of being autonomous ..â rewards take away our autonomy because ânow [we] are doing it for something else.â (Shankar Vedantam) Â We are no longer motivated, we are not longer doing it for our own happiness and empowerment, but because we will more likely gain something. And your language pretty much changes from âI want toâ to âI have toâ(Scott Geller.)
After understanding this concept, I was able to look at my own experiences and see how motivation affected my life in the past. From a very young age, Iâve always love to swim. I was told that when I was of the age of 5 to 6 years I would jump inside big pools without saying anything and  my parents had to pretty much jump to save me from drowning. Since we lived in Cali Colombia a place where pools are almost everywhere and were also the weekend entertainment of my family,  they put me on classes as soon as they could. From then on I was always in different courses, on and off and it became my passion. As I grew and started High School I got the opportunity to join a swimming group that trained and competed against other schools. The training was intense, we would be in the pool from Wednesday to Friday and Saturdays we worked out at the gym; as intense as it was I love every single bit of it. I was really motivated and became one of the best within my category.I trained hard for a whole year until my mother made it seem as if it was my obligation, rather than my hobby. If I didnât go to training I wouldnât be able to go out with my friends and every time we would talk about it, everything that I had accomplished was because of her efforts rather than mine. My motivation went away and I stopped going to class and by the time I decided to go back everyone was ahead of me. Thus, I decided to stop going which now is one of my biggest regrets
Bibliography
TEDxTalks. “The Psychology of Self-motivation | Scott Geller | TEDxVirginiaTech.” YouTube. YouTube, 2013. Web. 28 Sept. 2016.
LisaFosbender. “Psychology 101: Psychological Theories of Motivation.” YouTube. YouTube, 2013. Web. 28 Sept. 2016.
Vedantam, Shankar. “When Play Becomes Work.” Www.Washingtonposts.com. Department of Human Behavior, 28 July 2008. Web. 26 Sept. 2016.
Cameron Merisier
I believe that when people canât guess at a motivation, their brains are not satisfied. Their brains are not satisfied because we are driven to want answers. Type one thinking in my opinion is the reason doctors and scientists that constantly tries to find cures for diseases and viruses or causes for diseases and viruses, and they would do all the research and experiments necessary to find the answer. Another example is historians trying to find out unsolved mysteries. For example, what did Adolph Hitler have against the Jews or who is Jack the Ripper. We are wired to want to receive answers and explanation and when we receive it, our brain cherishes it.
Mitchell Landero
Motivation is view when a boy is always asking for a toy where ever the mother takes him. This toy to him is like a reward but he is a problematic child at home with an attitude and no control to listen. His mother pays no mind for he always does a seen in the location and knows that he doesn’t deserve anything due to the fact he is not passing his math class. The mothers realized that she had to change his mindset and persuade him to exceptional. The mother sets out an agreement where she will buy him a toy for every 85 and higher he brings home on a math test every two weeks. This agreement gave him the motivation or a drive to do exceptional. His instinct was to study because at the end of the day he would come home to something he wanted. So by the parent taking this authority to set out a plan it leads him to have a desire to chase his needs. This also is a positive reinforcement because it makes him study hard to get want he wants and the mother becomes more satisfied with his son’s grades.
Motivation is the reason behind the behavior or actions one acts in a particular way. The curiosity behind the motivation is the explanation of why we ask questions majority of the time its “why” and get an explanation. The explanation leads to the observation of a personâs drive, need or want. This process isn’t really seen or recognized because it’s done unconsciously. Many have motivations in life seen by people and even animals when they desire or are in necessity of possessing an object. A personâs instinct or drive is someoneâs natural reaction to a certain situation put in. There is also two more motivations which are total opposites and those are want and need. Want is desire for something and need is the lack of subsistence.
Unfortunately I see that a miscommunicated occurred here, since you have prepared your comments on the topic of Motivation, rather than on Cognition as I expected. I will accept this, since you did the work, but ask you, then, to plan to prepare a report on Cognition to replace the topic of Motivation in the second half of the semester. I also think you read one of the articles from the online collection I made and used that to frame your work. That’s not exactly what I expected but it’s certainly not a bad or wrong thing. It is, however, more what I had in mind for the midterm evaluation than for this assignment.
You should list all the members of your group who are actively involved so that I will know whether I should or should not award you the bonus points for having everyone in the group participate. Please write to let me know if you should get the bonus points.
Lastly, since the first entry contains the introduction to the topic, you should let me know if all group members participated in formulating that. Otherwise the entries by Merisier and Landero seem skimpy.
Gonzalez: You offer a nice introduction. Be careful about one thing: It’s true that most motivations come from our Type 1 thinking and are therefore largely if not necessarily entirely unconscious in how they operate. But we can make at least some of our motivations conscious – we can subject them to Type 2 thinking, if nothing else – and some motivations seem to start with a good deal of conscious thought – as when your mother gives you an argument for how you should act in certain circumstances and you then decide, based on what she’s said, how you will conduct yourself. You proceed to provide a nice example of a motivational process and so complete the assignment. I will give you 44/50.
Merisier: I appreciate your efforts to use the ideas that we have been developing in class – in this case, those pertaining to the differences between Type 1 and Type 2 thinking – but I am not going to buy much of what you say here about them. No doubt like all of us, scientists do most of their thinking, including thinking about what research they are going to do, using their Type 1 thinking and therefore being unaware of where the ideas come from or what their motivations for doing the work are, but I think science is precisely one of those places where all sorts of things operate fairly quickly and fairly soon to make scientists sit back and think about what they’re doing and why they’re doing it. It’s hard to imagine how a research protocol can come into being without copious amounts of Type 2 thinking going into it. That said, you don’t provide any observations or examples of the phenomenon you’re investigating yourself, so I am compelled to give you 32/50.
Landero: I regret to say that I am hard pressed to understand whether you are offering an observation of something that you saw happen or offering an idea of how you think the process of motivation might play out in an interaction between a mother and a child. In any case, although you present the relevant ideas in the first paragraph you should edit them to offer an account that is easier to follow. You start with a statement that sounds like the opposite of where you wind up. There are many ways to put such ideas together in ways easier to follow, but the simplest would be to start by telling the reader what the context is – how is the child behaving and what is the mother seeking to alter, then how does she think about intervening to alter the behavior, then what sort of way does she attempt to motivate him? I see that you did some work here but given the ambiguity of what you’ve written I can’t confirm that the assignment was completed, so I will give you 35/50.