Motivation Research

The term motivation was introduced in the 1930s by people in advertising who wanted to disclose the motives behind people's consumption choices. It originally referred to a set of unconscious factors that were thought to trigger people's behaviors, similar to the ring of a bell causing a dog to salivate in Pavlov's famous experiment. Thus, motivation research partially originated from the practical developments in marketing techniques and also from the ideological developments in the social sciences, which at the beginning of the twentieth century broke off with the model of economic man as described by classical economists. Sigmund Freud and Alfred Adler in psychology, Georg [Page 1003]Simmel, Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim, and Max Weber in sociology had introduced the idea that people's behavior need not ...