According to the APA Dictionary of Psychology, which description best captures what motivation is?
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Psychology · Foundations
Motivation
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motivation The internal process that directs and energizes behavior; the impetus that gives purpose or direction to action, operating at a conscious or unconscious level. Full entry → is the internal process that directs and energizes behavior — the impetus, as the APA Dictionary of Psychology puts it, that gives purpose or direction to what we do. Some motivation is intrinsic, arising from pleasure in the activity itself; some is extrinsic, coming from outside rewards and punishments. Drives like hunger and thirst push us to restore balance; the need for achievement A strong desire to accomplish goals and reach a high standard of performance and personal fulfillment; proposed by Henry Murray and studied extensively by David McClelland. Full entry → pushes us to do things well; goals give the energy a target. Real motivation is a mix, not a switch — and it is the why behind every action.
Why this matters
Motivation is the closest thing psychology has to an answer for the question behind every other question: why do people do what they do? Academically, it connects the foundations of this course — learning, emotion, development, and personality — because each of those topics describes a different engine of behavior. Practically, understanding motivation changes how you read your own choices: why a task you love feels effortless, why a reward can drain the pleasure from a hobby, why a goal The end state toward which a person is striving; the purpose of an activity or endeavor. Full entry → pulls you forward. And it matters honestly: motivation is rarely pure, and knowing that keeps you from misreading yourself and everyone around you.
The college version
What motivation is
Psychologists define motivation as the internal process that directs and energizes behavior. The APA Dictionary of Psychology calls it the impetus that gives purpose or direction to behavior, and notes that it operates in humans at a conscious or unconscious level. OpenStax Psychology 2e states the same idea more simply: motivation describes the wants or needs that direct behavior toward a goal. The Noba Project's Motives and Goals module calls it the psychological driving force that enables action in the pursuit of a goal. Three ideas recur across the definitions. Motivation is internal — it lives in the person, not in the situation. It directs — it aims behavior at something. And it energizes — it supplies the push that turns possibility into action. Because motivation is internal, psychologists cannot observe it directly; they infer it from what people choose, how hard they try, and how long they persist. The study of motivation is behavior read backward: every action is evidence of the motive behind it.
Intrinsic and extrinsic motivation
The most useful distinction in the field separates motivation that comes from inside the person from motivation that comes from outside. intrinsic motivation An incentive to engage in an activity that comes from pleasure or interest in the activity itself, rather than from outside benefits. Full entry → is an incentive to engage in an activity that derives from pleasure in the activity itself, as the APA Dictionary puts it — you do the thing because doing it feels good or interesting. Original example: Keiko spends Saturday afternoons repairing old bicycles in her garage; nobody pays or asks her, and she keeps at it because untangling a stuck gear train is satisfying in its own right. extrinsic motivation An incentive to engage in an activity that comes from outside the person, such as an expected reward or the avoidance of punishment. Full entry → is an external incentive to engage in an activity, especially motivation arising from the expectation of reward or punishment. Original example: Tomás drives for a weekend delivery service; he does not especially enjoy city traffic, but the paycheck makes the hours worthwhile. OpenStax gives the same split: intrinsically motivated behaviors are performed for the personal satisfaction they bring, while extrinsically motivated behaviors are performed to receive something from others. The two kinds behave differently and can interact in surprising ways.
Needs, drives, and the push to restore balance
A classic explanation of where motivation comes from is the drive A generalized state of readiness that motivates activity, typically created by deprivation of something the organism needs, such as food or water. Full entry → idea. According to drive theory The account of motivation holding that deviations from homeostasis create needs, which produce drive states that direct behavior toward restoring balance. Full entry →, as OpenStax presents it, deviations from homeostasis The tendency of an organism to maintain stable conditions across its physiological systems, such as body temperature or water levels. Full entry → create physiological needs, and those needs produce psychological drive states that direct behavior toward restoring balance. A drive, in the APA Dictionary's terms, is a generalized state of readiness that motivates activity, usually created by deprivation of something needed. The clearest examples are the classic drive states of hunger and thirst: hunger pushes you to find and eat food; thirst pushes you to drink fluids. (The biology of those signals belongs to another subject; the point here is psychological — a felt state aims behavior at a goal.) Drives are not only bodily. Psychologists also study social motives, and among them the need for achievement stands out — the APA Dictionary defines it as a strong desire to accomplish goals and attain a high standard of performance and personal fulfillment, proposed by Henry Murray and investigated extensively by David McClelland. Original example: Amara does not care about the certificate at the end of her community coding course, but she refuses to submit a project she knows has a flaw; the pull is toward doing something well.
Maslow's hierarchy: a theory, not a law
Abraham Maslow (1943) proposed a framework meant to span the whole range of motives, from biological to personal to social. His hierarchy of needs is usually drawn as a pyramid: at the base sit the physiological needs for survival; above them, needs for safety and security; then the need to belong and be loved; then esteem, the need for self-worth and confidence; and at the top, self-actualization The top tier of Maslow's hierarchy, in which a person strives to achieve their full potential. Full entry →, which Maslow described as achieving one's full potential. The organizing idea is that lower needs generally take priority: someone struggling to find enough food is unlikely to spend much energy wondering whether others admire them. The honest note: this is a theory, not a law. OpenStax records that Maslow's theory has been criticized for its subjective nature and its inability to account for real-world phenomena, and the ordering plainly fails sometimes — people pursue dignity, love, or meaning while basic needs go unmet, as hunger strikers show. Treat the pyramid as a map of the kinds of motives people have, not a strict checklist.
Goals, the honest note, and the honest framing
Motivation needs a target, and the target is a goal. The APA Dictionary defines a goal as the end state toward which an organism is striving — the purpose of an activity. The Noba Project adds that goals are fundamental guides for human behavior: a goal is the cognitive representation of a desired state. Stated simply: goals direct motivation — the clearer the goal, the more directly the energy has somewhere to go. First, motivation is a mix, not a switch. OpenStax is direct: in reality, our motivations are often a mix of intrinsic and extrinsic factors, and the nature of the mix changes over time. The overjustification effect shows why: an external reward added to an activity you already enjoy can weaken the intrinsic pull until the activity feels like work. Calling yourself intrinsically or extrinsically motivated as a fixed label misses how much the blend shifts with context. Second, the honest framing: motivation is the why behind every action. Ask why someone chose this, tried that hard, or quit early, and you are asking a motivation question; motivation, though invisible itself, is visible in the behavior it produces.
Eli explains
The same idea, in plain words
Explain it like I’m 10
Motivation is the engine of behavior — the internal push that points your actions at something and gives them power. Psychologists describe it as the process that directs and energizes what you do. Part of the push comes from inside: you do something because you enjoy it, like Keiko repairing bicycles for the fun of untangling gears. Part comes from outside: you do something for what it brings you, like Tomás driving deliveries for the paycheck. Some motives are built-in drives — hunger pushes you to eat, thirst pushes you to drink — and some are standards you hold yourself to, like the need to finish a job well. Goals give the engine a destination. And real motivation is almost never pure: it is a blend of inside and outside pulls that shifts with time and circumstance.
Picture it like this
Think of a car. Motivation is the engine, and a goal is the destination in the navigation system. The engine supplies the power — how hard the car pushes forward — and the destination decides the direction. The engine runs on a fuel blend, and in people the blend is a mix of pleasure in the driving itself (intrinsic) and the rewards waiting where you arrive (extrinsic). A car with a full tank but no destination burns fuel pointlessly; a car with a destination but no engine goes nowhere. You need both, and the mix of fuels changes along the way.
Where the picture stops working
The analogy breaks down in two ways. A car's engine and its destination are separate things, but in people the same motive can be both the push and the aim — the joy of solving a puzzle can be the reason you start and the reward you finish for. And a car runs on a fixed fuel blend, while a person's motivation is unstable: the same activity can shift from pleasure to obligation when deadlines, pay, or prizes enter, and the mix changes over time. Motivation is also rarely a single engine — several motives usually push at once, sometimes in different directions.
Worked example
Jordan has been sketching comic pages every night for two years, purely because inventing characters is fun — intrinsic motivation, the pleasure of the activity itself. Then a local magazine offers to publish a monthly strip for a small fee. Suddenly the sketching has deadlines, an audience, and a check. For the first two months Jordan still enjoys it; by month four the evenings feel like work, and the urge to sketch for fun fades — the pattern OpenStax describes through the overjustification effect, where added external rewards can diminish intrinsic motivation. Meanwhile the usual drives still run, and the need for achievement shows up when a page comes out wrong and Jordan redoes it until the layout is right, not because the editor asked. The lesson of the example is that no motive switched off; the blend simply changed. Jordan's motivation is still a mix — the magazine pays, the drawing pleases, the standard pulls — and the mix will keep shifting with context.
Key takeaway
Motivation is the internal process that directs and energizes behavior — a shifting blend of intrinsic pleasure, extrinsic rewards, drives, and goals that is the why behind every action.
Quick check
3 questions here, of 5 in this lesson’s practice set. Answers stay hidden until you check.
Which of the following is the clearest example of extrinsic motivation?
Choose an answer, then check it.
Maya skips breakfast, and by mid-morning she keeps thinking about the sandwich shop two blocks away and walks there instead of her usual route. Which concept best explains the shift in her behavior?
Choose an answer, then check it.
Study tools & related lessonsYou’ll learn to · Common mistakes · Easily confused · Key vocabulary · Related
You’ll learn to
- Define motivation as the internal processes that direct and energize behavior, and attribute the working definition to the APA Dictionary of Psychology and OpenStax Psychology 2e.
- Distinguish intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, using an original example of each.
- Explain the drive idea — that needs arising from imbalance push behavior toward restoring balance — and name hunger, thirst, and achievement as motives.
- Describe Maslow's hierarchy of needs, and explain why it is a theory rather than a law.
- Explain how goals direct motivation, and analyze why real motivation is usually a mix of intrinsic and extrinsic forces.
Common mistakes
"I am an intrinsically motivated person."
Motivation is not a fixed personality label. The same person's blend of intrinsic and extrinsic forces shifts with the activity and the circumstances; OpenStax notes that motivations are often a mix of both factors that changes over time.
"Rewards always make people want something more."
Not necessarily. In the overjustification effect, adding an external reward to an activity someone already enjoys can diminish intrinsic motivation, so the behavior may fade once the reward is gone.
"Maslow's pyramid is a proven law of human behavior."
It is a theory, proposed by Abraham Maslow in 1943, and it has been criticized for its subjective nature and for failing to account for real-world cases where people pursue higher needs while basic needs go unmet.
"If there is no visible reward, there is no motivation."
Motivation is internal and often operates below awareness — the APA Dictionary notes it works at a conscious or unconscious level. Hunger can push you to find food, and achievement can push you to redo flawed work, with no reward in sight.
Easily confused
Intrinsic motivation vs. extrinsic motivation
The behavior can look identical — the difference is the source of the incentive. Intrinsic motivation comes from pleasure in the activity itself; extrinsic motivation comes from outside benefits such as rewards or avoided punishments.
A drive vs. a goal
A drive pushes from behind — a felt state of need, like hunger, that presses you toward food. A goal pulls from ahead — the desired end state you are aiming at, like a marathon finish line. Both direct behavior, but from opposite directions.
Maslow's hierarchy vs. drive theory
Drive theory explains the push of specific needs toward restoring balance; Maslow's hierarchy organizes the full range of human motives — biological, personal, and social — into a priority pyramid. They answer different questions about the same behavior.
Motivation vs. emotion
Motivation directs and energizes behavior toward goals; emotion is the felt response to events. They constantly interact — fear can energize escape — but emotion is its own topic elsewhere in this course.
Key vocabulary
- motivation
- The internal process that directs and energizes behavior; the impetus that gives purpose or direction to action, operating at a conscious or unconscious level.
- intrinsic motivation
- An incentive to engage in an activity that comes from pleasure or interest in the activity itself, rather than from outside benefits.
- extrinsic motivation
- An incentive to engage in an activity that comes from outside the person, such as an expected reward or the avoidance of punishment.
- drive
- A generalized state of readiness that motivates activity, typically created by deprivation of something the organism needs, such as food or water.
- drive theory
- The account of motivation holding that deviations from homeostasis create needs, which produce drive states that direct behavior toward restoring balance.
- homeostasis
- The tendency of an organism to maintain stable conditions across its physiological systems, such as body temperature or water levels.
- need for achievement
- A strong desire to accomplish goals and reach a high standard of performance and personal fulfillment; proposed by Henry Murray and studied extensively by David McClelland.
- Maslow's hierarchy of needs
- Abraham Maslow's 1943 theory that human motives range from basic physiological needs up to self-actualization, often drawn as a pyramid; a theory, not a law.
- goal
- The end state toward which a person is striving; the purpose of an activity or endeavor.
- self-actualization
- The top tier of Maslow's hierarchy, in which a person strives to achieve their full potential.
Sources & references
- Motivation — OpenStax Psychology 2e, Section 10.1 — OpenStax / Rice University
- Motivation — APA Dictionary of Psychology — American Psychological Association
- Intrinsic Motivation — APA Dictionary of Psychology — American Psychological Association
- Extrinsic Motivation — APA Dictionary of Psychology — American Psychological Association
- Drive — APA Dictionary of Psychology — American Psychological Association
- Need for Achievement (n-Ach) — APA Dictionary of Psychology — American Psychological Association
- Goal — APA Dictionary of Psychology — American Psychological Association
- Motives and Goals — Noba Project — Noba Project (Diener Education Fund)
- Drive States — Noba Project — Noba Project (Diener Education Fund)
EliExplains lessons are original prose written from the open, credible references above. See Copyright & Licensing.
Researched 2026-08-22
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