Goal-Driven Cognition and Functional Behavior: The Fundamental-Motives Framework

Abstract

Fundamental motives have direct implications for evolutionary fitness and orchestrate attention, memory, and social inference in functionally specific ways. Motivational states linked to self-protection and mating offer illustrative examples. When self-protective motives are aroused, people show enhanced attention to, and memory for, angry male strangers; they also perceive out-group members as especially dangerous. In contrast, when mating motives are aroused, men show enhanced attention to and memory for attractive members of the opposite sex; mating motives also lead men (but not women) to perceive sexual arousal in attractive members of the opposite sex. There are further functionally specific consequences for social behavior. For example, self-protective motives increase conformity among both men and women, whereas mating motives lead men (but not women) to engage in anticonformist behavior. Other motivational systems trigger different adaptive patterns of cognitive and behavioral responses. This body of research illustrates the highly specific consequences of fitness-relevant motivational states for cognition and behavior, and highlights the value of studying human motivation and cognition within an evolutionary framework.

Fig. 1

In-group bias on threat-relevant and threat-irrelevant traits, as a function of self-protective concerns triggered by ambient darkness. Canadians in a darkened room were especially likely to evaluate Iraqis less favorably than they evaluated fellow Canadians. This effect was specific to prejudicial perceptions on traits highly relevant to safety threats (“hostile,” “trustworthy”) but not to perceptions of equally evaluative but threat-irrelevant traits (“ignorant,” “open-minded”). Results based on Schaller et al. (2003).

Fig. 2

Conformity as a function of activated motive. Both men and women are more conforming when self-protection motives are active (compared to a control condition). In contrast, activating mating motives leads men to become less conforming and, as discussed in the text, more creative and showy in other ways (results based on Griskevicius, Goldstein, Mortensen, Cialdini, & Kenrick, 2006).