The Behavioral Influences of Language
or
"Sticks and Stones may break my bones,
but words . . ."
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We turn now to questions of community action
- Remember we contrasted individual with community perspective. The individual
perspective looks at social behavior as simply the sum of individual behaviors. But we
reverse
that perspective. We are interested in explaining the variety of behavior in a community and
look at individual behavior as the invoking of an accepted community meaning system.
- Remember that meaning systems involve three functions:
- They are used to describe situations.
- They describe in such a way that they invoke values to evaluate elements of a
situation.
- In naming the situation properly, they frame our response to the situation.
- The last implies that meaning systems motivate behavior. We will now call meaning
systems "motives" and will explore the implications of that term.
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Changes in the way you think of motive
We will view motives differently than they have been viewed in dominant traditions of psychology
in this century.
Traditional Ways of Thinking about Motives:
Behaviorism
- Traditional Ways of Thinking about Motives focused on individual action. This
traces
from Descartes who seeks the bedrock of philosophy and decides it is "I think, therefore I am."
This starting point focuses questions of philosophy on the individual and all actions are derived
from his/her mentality. This makes us think of behavior as the behavior of one individual in a
single space-time moment.
- Traditional Ways of Thinking about Motives were analytical. That is, they operated
by
breaking the individual down into parts. Thus motivation was conceptualized as (1) drives
which existed in all human beings (2) were activated by some stimulus such as a message (3)
and once activated caused the individual to behave in a certain way. This created an elemental
perspective on motives in a couple ways:
- Motivation was in the individual. We broke the individual down into his/her drives,
saw
stimuli as external and behavior in simple causal response depending on which drives
were activated. All this was located in the brain.
- Motivation could be manipulated by identifying the characteristics in the individual
we
wished to tap. Thus, we would use demographic analysis or opinion polls to discover
the things that a group of individuals carried around with them that we could trigger.
Sociality was constructed as sheer similarity in individuals.
- Traditional Ways of Thinking about Motives were Physiological. Since drives and
thus
motives were within the brain, they could be studied as physiological states. Since we could
not cut up people's brains to study them, we developed theories of motivation from animal
experiments. We constructed accounts of human motivation based on humans character as
animal.
- Maslow's hierarchy of prepotency exemplifies such theories of motivation. Maslow argued that there are five levels of motivation in every individual. Until the lowest drives were satisfied, only that class of drives would be active and available to motivate behavior in that individual. Once generally satisified those drives would no longer motivate, but the next level of drive would become active instead. And so forth up the hierarchy of prepotency.
- Traditional Ways of Thinking about Motives turn to Motives to explain Causality.
The
key question is "What caused them to do that?" The answer is always found within, and is
obscured from observation by communication which may or may not be an accurate reflection
of the "real" motive inside the brain.
- Traditional Ways of Thinking about Motives treat Communication as Stimuli.
Messages
are studied as stimuli in a cause to effect model with behavior as the response mediated by the
internal drive state of the individual. This gives rise to the entire persuasion model that has
dominated communication study and to the theories of motivating through speaking.
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Our view changes the questions of motive: Symboliic motivation
- We focus on different questions
- John Dewey writes that "It is absurd to ask what induces a [hu]man to activity
generally
speaking. [A human] is active beings an active being and that is all there is to be said on
that score" Human Nature and Conduct (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston,
1922), p. 119.
- Branislaw Malinowski says, That humans eat is obvious and uninteresting. What is
interesting is that some do it with their fingers while others use a knife and fork.
- We seek to explain the variety of human behavior. We are not interested in
explaining the
similarities but the variety. We see clusters of behavior to be sure, but we see the coordinated
action of communities more than we do a whole community acting the same way based on
some common characteristics. We want to explain the interaction and the coordination and the
conflict within communities, not just the similarities.
- We seek the repetitive patterns of action in the community rather than individual
behavior. Any interest we have in individual behavior is within this context: the way in which
individuals as socially contextualized actors develop ways of seeing their situations in
community contexts.
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We reconceptualize motive to serve our need to answer
these
questions
- Motives are extra-psychological. Motives are not found in individuals, but
are in the
discourse which surrounds them. Motives are chosen as ways of meeting situations and
responding to them.
- Motives are symbolic. That is, communication does not re-present motives
in individuals,
but instead communication is real and is the motivational stuff of the community. Individual
motivation can only be understood as the communicative dimension of action. This means that
we study communication not to understand something we cannot see -- the state of internal
drives -- but to understand something that we can see -- the repetitive patterns of the
communication that coordinate action.
- Action is social and we need communication. When we remove the blinders of the
traditional perspective on motivation and think about action we realize that it is social at
several levels:
- Most obviously, most human action takes place within a group and communication
coordinates that action to involve many in an interaction.
- But, in addition, we realize that most individual action is learned from (patterned after)
the constant repetition of behavioral patterns by our social groups. We learn how to
respond to certain types of situations and we simply need to figure our what type of
situation this is we meet.
- When we act as individuals, we also seek approval or disapproval of our actions from
other individuals. This is an obviously social process.
- Finally, even when we are in total privacy, alone in a room with no one around, our
"conscience" invokes our social community in a process in which we question whether
our actions are appropriate.
- Communication is the place where motivation is framed.
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Motives are Performed in Language and Rhetoric
- We have seen that motives link description, evaluation, and response. Different
perceptions lead to different actions and with words and rhetoric a community discusses a
situation to reach a perspective on it. Thus, a choice of names is a choice of motivation.
Symbolic motives tie perception with action.
- Motives are social and thus shared by language. The shaping of a motivational
interpretation in the discourse of the community coordinates the response of that community to
the situation. The sharing of that motive in the "talk about" creates common behavior. In the
"talk about" interpretations develop and choices are played out in action.
- Motives thus emerge from community talk. The talk that we discussed forming the
identity
of the community frames these responses to typical situations. Communities develop a set of
important situations and ways of describing them. The ways of describing name the
responses.
- The discourse of a community lies before us for us to study to understand that
community's motivations.
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The Nature of our Study of Language and Behavior
- We look for motives in community rhetoric. Will tell us something about
perceptions of
reality. Will tell us something about the values of community. Will help us explain the rituals,
responses, the actions of the community.
- We look at differences between communities. We see the great waves of unity and
division
that unite communities and at other times divide them in conflict, that set some communities
against others, that ally some communities with others. These alignments are performed in the
motives.
- We look at differences over time. We see the evolution of motives used in
day-to-day life as
situations change and they are tested.
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