Motivation Types
Intrinsic, extrinsic, identified, integrated, amotivation — the self-determination ladder.
32 entries
All behaviors in Motivation Types
Achievement Motivation
The need to attain difficult standards of excellence, complete demanding tasks, and surpass prior performance — the system organises itself around a clear goal whose attainment, by itself, settles the question of whether the effort was worth making.
Affiliation Motivation
The pull to establish, maintain, and restore warm relations with others — the system organises around the felt-event of being-with-people, and connection itself is treated as a primary deposit-site rather than a means to some other end.
Amotivation
The condition in which a person engages in an activity — or attempts to — with no functioning motivation of any kind: no intrinsic interest, no external contingency that is registering, no internal scaffolding, no felt-sense of why the doing should continue, often producing going-through-the-motions without the motion's usual driver.
Approach Motivation
The directional pole of motivation in which behaviour is organised around moving toward something desired — a goal, a state, an outcome, a person, an experience — with the body's forward pressure oriented around acquisition rather than escape.
Avoidance Motivation
The directional pole of motivation in which behaviour is organised around moving away from a feared or undesired outcome — failure, loss, judgment, pain, exposure — with the body's forward pressure oriented around escape or prevention rather than acquisition.
Awe-Driven Motivation
The motivational pattern in which contact with vastness — natural, conceptual, artistic, or spiritual — exerts a pull toward sustained engagement, because the encounter has temporarily shifted the size of the self relative to the world.
Curiosity-Driven Motivation
The motivational pattern in which a not-yet-resolved question is itself the pull — the system moves toward the unknown because the unknown is interesting, not because the answer will produce a separable reward.
External Regulation
The most extrinsic point on the Self-Determination continuum, in which behaviour is driven entirely by external contingency — reward, punishment, surveillance — with no felt-sense of personal endorsement and no internal scaffolding to keep the loop running once the contingency lifts.
Extrinsic Motivation
The condition in which an activity is pursued not for the doing of it but for a separable outcome attached to it — pay, grade, status, escape from consequence — with the activity itself reduced to a means and the deposit deferred to a future account.
Fear-Driven Motivation
The motivational pattern in which action is being mobilised by the anticipation of a future negative state — the system is moving to prevent the bad thing, and the bad thing's possibility is what supplies the forward-pressure.
Identified Regulation
An autonomous form of extrinsic motivation in which the activity is consciously endorsed for its instrumental value — the doing is still not its own reward, but the outcome the doing serves has been examined and chosen, so the effort is paid with the felt-sense of agency rather than coercion.
Identity-Driven Motivation
The motivational pattern in which the activity is being chosen because it is consistent with who the system already takes itself to be — the forward-pressure comes from 'this is what someone like me does', present-tense and self-defining.
Integrated Regulation
The most autonomous form of extrinsic motivation, in which an activity's underlying value has not only been examined and endorsed but woven into the broader structure of who you understand yourself to be — the regulation no longer feels like a choice because it has become part of identity.
Intrinsic Motivation
The condition in which the doing of the thing is itself the reward — interest, curiosity, and the felt-sense of engagement supply their own forward pressure, with no separable outcome required to make the activity worth continuing.
Introjected Regulation
An internalised but not integrated form of extrinsic motivation, in which behaviour is driven by self-administered pressure — guilt, shame, ego-involvement, contingent self-worth — rather than by external contingency or felt-value, with the watcher installed inside the self.
Lost Motivation Patterns
The umbrella entry for the family of failure modes in which a motivation loop, once running, stops running — distinguishing drift, decay, spikes, and burnout as four mechanically distinct collapses of the same equation.
Mastery Motivation
The condition in which the pull to do the work is the pull to get better at it — improvement itself is the goal, mistakes are information rather than verdicts, and the standard the system measures against is its own prior performance.
Meaning-Driven Motivation
The motivational pattern in which the activity is being chosen because it serves a purpose the system has integrated as worth its effort — the forward-pressure comes from the felt-sense that this work matters in the larger arc of a life.
Motivation Burnout
The collapse point of an overdrawn meaning system in which the loop can no longer run at all — distinguished from decay or spikes by its identity-level depth: rest does not reach it because the depleted account is meaning itself.
Motivation Decay
The shrinkage of a motivation loop in which the target stays the same, the effort stays the same, but the deposit progressively falls — the same activity produces less and less pull, with no obvious cause and no recoverable reward.
Motivation Drift
The slow lateral migration of a motivation loop from its original target to a less central one — the loop is still running, the effort is still being paid, but what is now being pursued is not what was originally meant, and the divergence is often invisible until measured in years.
Motivation Spikes
The boom-bust failure mode in which a motivation loop runs in short, high-energy pulses followed by collapse — the peaks feel like productivity and identity confirmation, but the averages are low, the deposit is shallow, and the loop produces a steady residue of post-spike crashes.
Performance Motivation
The condition in which the pull to do the work is the pull to be seen doing it well — the standard is external, the verdict is the deposit-site, and the activity becomes a means of demonstrating competence rather than acquiring it.
Power Motivation
The pull to have impact — to influence, persuade, shape, or change the behaviour and circumstances of other people and systems — which deposits cleanly when the impact serves something beyond the self and accrues residue when the impact becomes its own end.
Prevention Focus
The regulatory orientation in which the system tracks losses and duties — the question being asked of every choice is *what must I not lose* — producing vigilant approach-via-avoidance behaviour, conscientiousness, and a specific relationship to safety that has both protective value and a particular cost when it runs chronic.
Pride-Driven Motivation
The motivation to act in order to produce, preserve, or display a sense of one's own worth — when the worth is earned through real contact with mastery or contribution, it deposits cleanly; when it is hubristic, the same outward act becomes a substitute that runs on display and collapses without an audience.
Promotion Focus
The regulatory orientation in which the system tracks gains and aspirations — the question being asked of every choice is *what could I attain* — producing approach behaviour, eagerness, and a tolerance for false starts that pursuing-the-positive requires.
Revenge-Driven Motivation
The motivational pattern in which action is being mobilised retributively — the work is being done to redress a specific past wound, often through accomplishment that would symbolically rebalance what was once taken or violated.
Self-Transcendent Motivation
The pull to orient effort toward something larger than the self — a value, a cause, a person, a tradition, a sense of the sacred — in which the deposit-site is explicitly outside the self and the self's own outcomes become secondary to the felt-mattering of the larger thing.
Service-Driven Motivation
The motivation to act because the act benefits someone other than the self — when chosen, it lands as some of the highest-density work the system can do; when compulsive, it becomes a substitute in which caretaking carries the weight that worth was supposed to.
Shame-Driven Motivation
The motivational pattern in which action is being mobilised by a present-tense self-evaluation as defective — the work is compensatory, an ongoing attempt to overwrite a felt judgement that the self, as it currently stands, is not enough.
Spite-Driven Motivation
The motivational pattern in which action is being mobilised oppositionally — the work is being done FOR an imagined disapprover, to prove them wrong, even when the disapprover is not watching and the proof would not change their mind.