Beyond Pleasure and Pain

As one who has spent a lifetime trying to motivate people, I can testify that we could all benefit greatly by sitting back and learning the facts about human motivation. A good friend who has recently been catapulted unwillingly into command of a significant enterprise revealed a common assumption about motivation. Basically, the only tool at her disposal was performance bonuses -- carrots. As a manager of a small company, I fumbled for years, trying to understand the motivations staff, clients and prospects. As a parent, I faced the common problem of finding a way to "build a fire" under a pair of teenagers. I frequently got it wrong. This book would have changed everything ...

"Beyond Pleasure and Pain" is an exhaustive review of what we know about human motivation, on the basis of more than a century of experimentation.

It turns out that most of us have no idea how motivation works. But it's not a dark mystery. On the basis of massive evidence, Higgins shows that people are motivated by three main factors (not just "carrots and sticks"):

• Value -- Which is the the old carrot and stick idea. We want to get things we value and avoid things we fear. Even this is not so simple, since it turns out that two people will perceive an identical situation in different ways depending on whether they are prone to seek opportunity or avoid unpleasantness.
• Truth -- People are curious. People lose interest in "carrots" when they think the rewards are unlikely. The motivation of cautious people are motivated to avoid disaster is all out of proportion to the likelihood of the disaster. Shared reality plays a huge part in people's motivations -- what people think is real.
• Control -- People lose interest of they don't feel they are in control and will sometimes be motivated to take control for its own sake.

These three factors interact in myriad ways and affect individuals in different ways in different situations. Higgins presents literally hundreds of cases with a similar number of experimental results, allowing the reader to get a practical grasp of the vocabulary of human motivation.

Higgins addresses many of the other aspects of motivation, such as how motivated people are, how they determine value and truth and how the way a person acts in a given situation influences what the person actually does in that situation. His approach is to tease apart all the subtle issues and always to back to the lab to answer them. There is no philosophy in this book. It's about human beings and what actually makes them tick.