Models and motives

Abstract

Why do people do what they do? To address this question the papers in this volume take a new look at the nature and sources of human motivation. Human motivation has to be understood as the product of interaction between events and things in the social world and interpretations of those events and things in people's psyches. In this introduction I argue that models of motivation need to reject not only psychobiological determinism but also sociocultural determinism, if the latter is taken to mean that private interpretations are replicas of public messages.