Drive Theory

Definition

Drive refers to increased arousal and internal motivation to reach a particular goal. Psychologists differentiate between primary and secondary drives. Primary drives are directly related to survival and include the need for food, water, and oxygen. Secondary or acquired drives are those that are culturally determined or learned, such as the drive to obtain money, intimacy, or social approval. Drive theory holds that these drives motivate people to reduce desires by choosing responses that will most effectively do so. For instance, when a person feels hunger, he or she is motivated to reduce that drive by eating; when there is a task at hand, the person is motivated to complete it.

Background

Clark L. Hull is the most prominent figure from whom this comprehensive drive theory of learning and motivation was postulated. The theory itself was founded on very straightforward studies of rat behavior done by Hull's students, Charles T. Perin and Stanley B. Williams. The rats were trained to run down a straight alley way to a food reward. Thereafter, two groups of rats were deprived of food, one group for 3 hours and the other for 22. Hull proposed that the rats that were without food the longest would have more motivation, thus a higher level of drive to obtain the food reward at the end of the maze. Furthermore, he hypothesized that the more times an animal was rewarded for running down the alley, the more likely the rat was to develop the habit of running. As expected, Hull and his students found that length of deprivation and number of times rewarded resulted in a faster running speed toward the reward. His conclusion was that drive and habit equally contribute to performance of whichever behavior is instrumental in drive reduction.

Application to Social Psychology

When a person is hungry or thirsty, he or she feels tension and is motivated to reduce this state of discomfort by eating or drinking. A state of tension can also occur when a person is watched by other people or simultaneously holds psychologically inconsistent beliefs or thoughts. The theory of cognitive dissonance, proposed by social psychologist Leon Festinger, suggests that when a person is faced with two beliefs or thoughts that are contradictory, he or she feels psychological tension. This psychological tension is a negative drive state that is similar to hunger or thirst. Once a person feels cognitive dissonance, he or she is motivated to reduce this psychological tension, modifying beliefs or thoughts to match one another.

An interesting application of drive theory to social psychology is found in Robert Zajonc's explanation of the social facilitation effect, which suggests that when there is social presence, people tend to perform simple tasks better and complex tasks worse (social inhibition) than they would if they were alone. The basis for social facilitation comes from social psychologist Norman Triplett, who observed that bicyclists rode faster when competing against each other directly than in individual time trials. Zajonc reasoned that this phenomenon is a function of humans' perceived difficulty of the task and their dominant responses: those that are most likely given the skills humans have. When drives are activated, people are likely to rely on their easily accessible dominant response, or as Hull would suggest, their habits. Therefore, if the task comes easy to them, their dominant response is to perform well. However, if the task is perceived as difficult, the dominant response will likely result in a poor performance. For instance, imagine a ballet dancer who was ill-practiced and often made several errors during her routine. According to drive theory, when in the presence of others at her recital, she will display her dominant response, which is to make mistakes even more so than when alone. However, if she spent a substantial amount of time polishing her performance, drive theory would suggest that she may have the best performance of her dancing career (which she might never match in solitude).

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