Читать книгу Positive Psychology - Группа авторов - Страница 21

As long as a person in need receives help, why worry about whether the underlying motivation is altruistic or egoistic? The answer to this question depends on your interest. If you’re only interested in getting help in this situation for this person (you perhaps?), the nature of the motivation may not matter. But if you’re interested in knowing more generally when and where help can be expected – and how effective it is likely to be (perhaps with an eye to creating a more caring society) – then to understand the underlying motivation is essential. If, for example, I am motivated to help in order to impress you, then if you won’t know whether I help or not, this motivation and my help will disappear.

As argued by Kurt Lewin (1951), explanatory stability for human action is found in the link of a given motive to its ultimate goal, not found in behavior or in behavioral consequences. Behavior is highly variable. Occurrence of a given behavior, including helping, depends on the strength of the motive or motives that might evoke this behavior, as well as on (a) the strength of competing motives in the situation, (b) how the behavior relates to each of these motives, and (c) other behavioral options available at the time. It also depends on whether the behavior promotes an instrumental or an ultimate goal. The more directly a certain behavior promotes an ultimate goal, and the more uniquely it does so among the behavioral options available, the more likely the behavior is to occur. Behavior that promotes an instrumental goal can change if either (a) the causal association between the instrumental and ultimate goal changes or (b) better behavioral pathways to the ultimate goal appear that bypass the instrumental goal.

Yet, complicating matters, we infer motivation from behavior, although not from a single instance of behavior. Instead, we infer motivation from the pattern of behavior across situations that vary in the best way to reach different possible ultimate goals. Inference from such a pattern has allowed us to identify the ultimate goal of empathy‐induced motivation to help.