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When we ask why something happens, we may get several quite different answers, depending upon which sense of the word "why" the speaker imagines us to have in mind. Sometimes when we ask "why" we merely want to know a definition:
Q: Why are they at war?
A: Because they keep shooting at each other. (Question assumed to mean: "Why is what they are doing called "war"?)
More usually we want to know (1) the background situation, and (2) the motivations of the people involved:
Q: Why are they at war?
A: Because both countries were about equally powerful. (Background situation.)
A: Because someone shot the archduke. (Background situation.)
A: Because they thought they could capture the city. (Motivation.)
Obviously there can be many kinds of background situations. For the time being, however, we confine ourselves to human motivations. Human motivations have several quite different facets. Our behavior is influenced by our goals, our values, our emotions, our character, and so on:
Q: What was their motivation for undertaking the war?
A: They hoped to capture the city and its riches. (Their material goal.)
A: Their honor had been insulted. (Their values.)
A: They were angry. (Their emotional state.)
A: They enjoyed causing misery. (Their character.)
Among the most important of these are the actor's goals. But why somebody does something is not always easy to understand. Just looking at the behavior, or its results, does not necessarily explain why someone behaved as he did:
Q: Why did little Addie feed worms to her little brothers?
A: Because they were starving. (Her goal was to save her brothers from starvation.)
A: Because worms were her favorite food. (Her goal was to make her brothers happy.)
A: Because her friend Ida promised to pay her 25ยข if she got someone to eat the worms. (Her goal was related to an external condition. Her brothers just happened to wander by at that moment.)
A: Because she was a sadistic little brat. (Her goal was to make her brothers suffer.)
Notice that people are not always aware of their own motivations. They can be motivated by unconscious goals that they themselves have difficulty identifying and explaining. To answer the question "why" a given person does something, we need to try to take account of goals, whether they are conscious or unconscious.
Q: Why does Herb drive to UCSD?
Background Situation:
A: Because he lives in XXIst century California.
A: Because he has a car.
A: Because he lives too far away to walk easily.
A: Because he is not in good enough shape to get his bicycle up the hill.
Conscious Motivations:
A: Because he wants to get to his MMW class early enough to sit in front.
Unconscious Motivations:
A: Because it makes him feel important to hear the motor roar.
A: Because driving a car symbolizes sexual intercourse.
A: Because he enjoys fantasies of running down people who drive him nuts
A: Whatever. (Herb can't tell you his unconscious motivations, since they are unconscious, after all. They can only be inferred after long contact with Herb and his behavior. Herb himself will probably deny them.)
Bottom Line(s):
Presumably all our behavior is motivated by our goals, whether they are conscious or unconscious. That is, we act because we desire the consequences of our actions. That doesn't mean that we want all of the consequences. Some consequences are irrelevant or negative "side effects" of our behavior. There may be some consequences that we don't foresee at all.
Q: What are the consequences of Herb driving to UCSD?
Consciously Intended Consequences:
A: Herb gets from home to his MMW class. (That was his primary goal.)
A: Herb gets to listen to a little news on the radio if the static is not too bad. (That is a very minor, secondary goal.)
Unconsciously Intended Consequences:
A: Herb gets to indulge all those unconscious goals mentioned above. (These are goals too, but Herb can't assess how important they were.)
Unintended Consequences (Recognized):
A: Herb pollutes the air.
A: Herb has to pay for parking.
A: Herb arrives in a vile mood because the *#&$% administration has never solved the *&%# parking problem.
Unintended Consequences (Unrecognized):
A: Herb's vile mood causes him to make enemies by snarling at everybody.
Bottom Line(s):
For historians and social scientists, as well as for reporters and the general public, it is tempting to look at the consequences of behavior in order to estimate its motivation. For example, such and such a member of the board of directors votes a certain way, and as a consequence the value of his stock goes up. We readily infer that he was motivated to vote as he did with the conscious goal of raising the value of his stock. In fact, however, we do not know that.
Whether talking about individuals, groups, or even whole societies, it is a fundamental logical error to assume that the consequence of any action was necessarily consciously intended.
The best way to study human motivation is by means of depth interviews with the humans involved. To study large numbers of people, depth interviews are not practical. For people already dead, they are not possible. So what is the next best thing? Most specialists go through a series of procedures designed to develop an approximation to direct interviews: