target image The Synchronic Motivation System: A Key to Personality and Therapy

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New - an essay discussing basic problems of world cultures: "The Combative Dominance Syndrome"

This web site will introduce you to some unfamiliar concepts that will require changes in your thinking about personality and psychotherapy(and maybe even life). Unfortunately, unfamiliarity sometimes breeds rejection (if not contempt). Nevertheless, change in the right direction is the right thing to do. Stick with us, keep an open mind, and you will find a useful, effective, and realistic way to analyze and understand personality.

The General Systems Point-of-View

The first and most basic concept to be presented is the general systems approach to knowledge. The word "system" is used frequently in everyday discourse. However, it is frequently used in a vague and indefinite way - usually as a synonym or substitute for "method" or "technique." Its use as a scientific point-of-view was created by biologist Ludwig von Bertalanffy. Bertalannfy described systems analysis as a way of looking at the world that helps us unify knowledge. In more recent years, James Grier Miller's book, Living Systems, has greatly expanded and detailed the systems point-of-view.

Why a Systems Approach?

To begin with, all phenomena exist and operate within systems. Our solar system is a well recognized example of a physical dynamic system. All the planets systematically orbit the sun which provides the organizing power for our solar system. At the living system level and going back to the earliest stages of modern psychology, Pavlov recognized that he was dealing with more than just simple stimulus-response relationships in his conditioning experiments. He noted that his dogs responded to the sound of a bell with more than just conditioned salivation. They jumped and barked and shook in the experimental situation. At the human level, children do not learn to read by means of simple stimulus-response exercises. They learn that words are composed of elements (the alphabet) and discover how words combine to produce larger systems of sentences and ideas. We must recognize that our environment functions as a set of interrelated physical and living systems. Manipulation of any one element in an ecosystem can have reverberating consequences that are sometimes disastrous.

Don't Tell Anyone - But:
One might call systems theory a widely held set of secret unconscious beliefs because most people intuitively understand what it is all about. Many behavioral scientists do not want to acknowledge the validity of systems theory because it is more complex and difficult than the prevailing single-concept way of analyzing and explaining events. However, as long as we continue to try to understand and explain systems phenomena with simplistic concepts, we will continue, in the words of the Rubaiyat, to "come out by the same door wherein we went."

A Few Basic General Systems Concepts

1. A system is composed of two or more elements that are interrelated by an organizing principle. For example, a transportation system is a social system that has a basic function (organizing principle) of moving people and things from one place to another. Organized around this general function are many elements and subsystems such as a highway network (and a tax system to support it), an auto and truck industry, gasoline or fuel suppliers, restaurants and motels to provide eating and sleeping accommodations, etc. Each of these subsystems is an element of the transportation system and is related to all of the other elements either directly or through the basic organizing function or purpose of the transportation system. Without this basic function, a car or a truck and many other parts of the system would be useless and meaningless.   2. Systems are organized so that the parts or elements limit each other's power. This function of checks and balances is necessary to prevent the development of internal monopolies that would cause the system to become overspecialized and non-adaptive. In the United States political system, for example, the legislative, executive, and judicial branches are designed to impose limits on each other to prevent monopolistic accumulations of power. There is a growing awareness of the necessity for checks and balances in the ecology system.   3. The parts (elements) of a system are organized in a hierarchical structure. Control in a system is not linear or chain-like but has an inclusive structure with the higher elements in control of the lower elements and subsystems. Hierarchical control is necessary to prevent waste of energy in internal conflicts between elements. However, there can be (and often are) internal conflicts within a system during periods of development or trauma. Changes are constantly taking place in living systems as they mature and become more differentiated and complex (negative entropy). Despite increasing complexity, a system must maintain its integrity. It does this by means of its organizing principle and its hierarchical structure of controls. However, as far as we know, all living systems eventually disintegrate and die.   4. The more versatile the elements in a system, the more efficient and adaptable the system. By serving more than one function,elements can be rearranged to create a variety of subsystems to cope with different situations. Obvious examples of this occur in social systems in which the same person may play a variety of roles to meet the specialized needs of the system. A baseball player, for example, may play the shortstop position in the first half of an inning but becomes a batter in the second half. In a symphony orchestra, the brass and strings may switch back and forth between playing the theme and providing background figures.   5. The principle of equifinality states that a system may produce the same final result in a number of different ways. The more complex and efficient the system, the more resources are available to achieve its goals. A good traffic system has alternative roads (paths) to a destination so that traffic jams or bottlenecks do not develop if one route is blocked. Damage to one part of the brain may be compensated by establishing other neural paths. With regard to personality, a person usually has a variety of actions available to satisfy a need. A corollary principle is that the same action can serve different needs.   6. Each living system must have a subsystem (called the decider) that has the specialized function of making decisions or choices. A decision is the basis for action. An action cannot take place without a prior authorizing decision although the decision does not have to be conscious and it can be automated or preprogrammed (as with habits or sets). Because the human personality interacts with more aspects of reality than any other system, the human decider must be exceptionally complex and resourceful. Human decisions go beyond immediate circumstances and considerations and must take into account the future consequences and far reaching ramifications of actions. Human decisions are made by rules, general principles, judgment and, if all else fails,our will.   Summary: Our understanding of human personality would be greatly facilitated by recognizing that personality is a highly complex and integrated system composed of subsystems such as the motivation and emotion systems, endocrine systems, cognitive systems, etc. Personality functions as a subsystem of environmental systems.   Hello! Are you still there? Hang in or hang on (just don't hang up).

The Picture Identification Test

Most of the concepts and findings presented in this site are based on research with the Picture Identification Test (PIT). The PIT is not exactly a household name among those seeking to understand personality so it will be helpful to provide some general information about it.   Although the PIT is not well known, it is not a recently developed personality test. Its origins go back to the early 1950s. It is not a static immutable instrument. It has evolved and continues to develop as new findings occur. It is definitely a systems based instrument. Its primary elements are the Murray needs of the Murray need system. (See Need Defintions). It produces three types of scores for each of the 22 needs. Each need receives an attitude score (good or bad perceived qualities of the need), a judgment score (perceived occurrence of the need), and a set of inter-need association scores (closeness or affinity with each of the other needs). There have been 25 published and many other unpublished validation studies based on the PIT. (With regard to unpublished research, we can defensively assert that it is not easy to get innovative systems based research past the gatekeepers of the psychological establishment.) These highly controlled studies have consistently shown that the PIT discriminates well adjusted and poorly adjusted groups and that it identifies motivational differences between such groups (see reference section).   The PIT is a projective test. Projective techniques require the subject to report what they perceive in an external stimulus rather than report on their own experiences, reactions, or beliefs. For example, the Rorschach examiner asks the subject: What does the inkblot look like to you? The Thematic Apperception Test (TAT) examiner asks: What story does this picture bring to your mind?   The PIT asks the subject to report the strength of a need perceived in a facial expression photograph. There was a time when many psychologists would have agitatedly exited this site after that last sentence as they vividly recalled the admonitions in their general psychology textbook about not judging people by their faces. In case you are still with us, we will try to calm such concerns. The PIT asks the subject to judge the strength of a need in a facial expression; not the traits or character of a subject on the basis of her or his physiognomy or facial features. Facial expressions are transient means of communication and are not determined by the physical features of a person. So - when we rate facial expressions we are not judging a person's character or abilities - just what he or she is communicating at a particular moment.   Facial expressions change according to the information a person wishes to convey. In studies of facial emotional expression, recent work by Paul Ekman, Friesen, Sorenson, Ellsworth, and others has shown that there are universal emotions that are communicated by similar facial expressions by people around the world. The expressions change when the emotional state of the person changes. The PIT is based on the assumption that motives or intentions are also communicated by facial expressions that are reliably interpreted by others. There is considerable evidence to support this assertion. Since the 1950s, PIT data have shown that normal subjects (over 8000) significantly agree on the facial communication (via photographs) of the PIT needs. Correlation coefficients between the averaged ratings of normal groups(including subjects from India and England) have consistently been .70 or higher.  

The Synchronic Motivation System

This report is not just about the motivation system. Its about the synchronic motivation system. This means that it is about which needs or motives can and which cannot be effectively expressed simultaneously. Synchronicity and diachronicity are concepts used by archaeologists to describe events that happened at the same time (synchronically) and events that happened at different times (diachronically). Most psychologists are not familiar with these concepts. To explain and predict behavior, psychologists search for traits. Traits are recurring forms of behavior a person exhibits over a period of time. To say that a person has a strong trait of aggression is to say that you can expect the person to consistently be aggressive over time. Traits are useful classification tools but they are not the most effective variables for predicting adjustment problems. PIT data indicate that adjustment does not depend as much on the strength or prevalence of motives and traits as it depends on how motives and traits are temporally combined. Two people may have equally strong needs for dominance but if one simultaneously tries to combine dominance with deference and the other keeps the dominance and deference needs temporally separated, the first person will have greater adjustment problems than the second.   So, - you might well ask, how does the PIT measure synchronicity of need activity? You may recall that the PIT asks the subject to rate a facial photograph for the strength of expression of each of 22 Murray based needs. A photograph represents a "frozen moment" in time. Therefore, needs rated as present in the same photograph are perceived as simultaneously (synchronically) expressed. Needs perceived as not being expressed in the same photograph but expressed in different photographs are temporally separated (diachronically expressed). The PIT five point rating scale for strength of expression allows for the measurement of degrees of synchronicity.

Next question: So what?

The following is an attempt to answer this rather (from our sensitive perspective) pointed question.   Needs are synchronically compatible or incompatible according to the kinds of behaviors used to satisfy them. For example, the dominance need is defined by the PIT as the need to assert leadership and act in a commanding and persuasive way. The deference need is defined as the need to follow the advice and guidance of those with experience and authority. These two needs obviously call for different and opposed types of behavior. One can't direct others at the same time one is obeying them. One can certainly dominate in one situation and defer in another and, if one's judgment is good, such selective behavior could be quite adaptive and rewarding. When it comes to adjustment, however, motivational conflict can only occur when opposing needs are simultaneously activated. What the PIT reveals, that no other instrument does, is how well the subject temporally combines and differentiates needs.

The Dimensional Structure of the Synchronic Motivation System

The next conceptual obstacle blocking our path to fuller comprehension of what life is all about is an understanding of the dimensional structure of the synchronic motivation system. First, a review pop quiz: What are the three types of need scores provided by the PIT? Answer: the attitude, perceptual judgment, and inter-need association scores. The inter-need association scores are the ones we will be elaborating on with regard to the dimensional structure of the synchronic motivation system.   A short further review for those who got less than a C on the above test:   PIT inter-need associations are based on the ratings a subject makes of the photographs of facial expressions. The subject rates each of the 22 PIT needs according to how strongly each need is expressed in each of 12 facial photographs. Over the series of 12 pictures, the average absolute difference between the ratings for each pair of needs is computed. For example, the aggression need and the defendance need might be given similar ratings for all 12 pictures resulting in a "close" association between this pair of needs. If two needs are consistently given opposite ratings across the 12 stimulus pictures, the difference will be large and the association between the pair of needs will be "distant."   The associative distances between each pair of needs form a 22 X 22 matrix (similar to a correlation matrix). A matrix of distance measures between a set of elements can be analyzed by multi dimensional scaling techniques (MDS). Multi dimensional scaling is a relatively new statistical mathematics technique that determines the systems structure (if there is one) in a set of elements. MDS asks the question: are all the elements interrelated and, if so, how are they interrelated? For example, if we want to know how people intuitively classify historical figures we could select a set of 20 widely known people from a variety of backgrounds, historical periods, and reputations. We would present each pair of the 20 figures (190 unique pairs) to our research subjects and ask them to rate each pair for how similar or different they judge them to be. Note: We do not give the subjects a pre selected set of personality descriptions on which to rate the historic figures. That would limit and structure their ratings in a predetermined way. The research subjects consciously or unconsciously find their own criteria for association and differentiation. When these similarity (or distance) ratings are processed by an MDS computer program, the program will go through many tortuous iterations looking for dimensions (iteration is a computer obsessive-compulsive ritual). If it finds a solution the computer will regain its mental health and tell you what the underlying dimension are for the classification of historical figures. The dimensions may be something like (just guessing): good-bad, strong-weak, active-inactive, or something we would never have guessed. The computer doesn't actually label the dimensions - the researcher has to look at the way the historical figures are arranged along each dimension and then (after a great deal of argument with peers) put a descriptive label on the dimensions. The dimensions may vary according to the historical figures selected and the subjects used but if your subject sample is representative and your historical figures general and inclusive, you will get enlightening results.

Back to the PIT and the Inter-need Association Matrix

When the PIT inter-need association matrices of a set of normal subjects were analyzed by INDSCAL (the MDS program that was originally used), the results were decisive. A three dimension analysis provided a definite solution. Repeated MDS analyses of different groups of normal subjects have produced structures highly similar to the original model (correlation coefficients in the .90s for group results). Differences between male and female subjects were slight (projective measures tend to produce less gender differences than self-report tests). The PIT MDS model is called the PIT synchronic motivation system target model but we just call it the target model. (See Motivation System Target Model).

Introduction to the Combative Dimension

The first dimension produced by MDS is labeled the combative dimension. It was the strongest dimension (in MDS terms it took up more dimensional space). MDS does not provide labels for the dimensions. It just provides the structure of the elements (in this case - the needs). As with factors or clusters, (and as stated above), the researcher has to examine the structure and come up with a name that seems appropriate. You can examine the target model and see if you think the label "combative" is appropriate. Since most people feel it is reasonably descriptive we probably won't change its name unless you can make a really impressive argument. Notice that the top end of the dimension has needs such as aggression, defendance, rejection, etc. The bottom end of the dimension has needs such as deference, abasement, nurturance, etc. Thus, the dimension has combative needs at one end and noncombative needs at the other end. Dimensions should be thought of as having polarized opposing ends rather than "high" and "low" scores. The orientation of the dimensional structure is up to the researcher who can rotate the structure any way that seems meaningful (like rotating a map or a globe to a familiar orientation).   It may seem unfortunate, bad, or wrong for the combative dimension to be the strongest dimension. However, due consideration points to a conclusion that it is realistic. We are constantly confronted with combativeness in TV, newspapers, and every day life. We operate in the combative dimension when we are involved in a struggle for possession of things or control and influence over people. Politicians must operate in this dimension most of the time (some politicians come to mind that do so all the time). We are motivated by the needs in the combative end of the scale when we use power to get what we want and we are motivated by the needs in the noncombative end of the scale when we wish to avoid conflict. Combative conflicts can vary all the way from slight disagreements to violent physical assaults. A combative conflict can end in victory, defeat, truce, stalemate, or a draw. The opponents must decide the outcome among themselves (sometimes with the help of mediators). Insofar as opponents let judges decide the outcome, or they try to resolve issues by rational means, the action becomes less combative and more competitive or impersonal.   It is somewhat reassuring that people generally have negative attitude scores (remember those PIT need attitude scores you couldn't think of in the pop quiz?) for the combative needs and positive attitude scores for most of the needs in the noncombative end of the dimension. Since our values and attitudes also affect behavior, maybe our values will save us from extinction by our combative impulses.

Introduction to the Personal-Social Dimension

The second strongest dimension produced by PIT MDS analyses has been labeled the personal-social dimension. (See Motivation System Target Model). We operate in the personal dimension when we seek to establish or maintain good personal-social ties with others. We are motivated by the needs in the personal end of the scale when we are warm, trusting, intimate, and close with others. We are motivated by the needs in the impersonal end of the scale when we try to avoid failure in our personal-social relationships by working out orderly, rational solutions to conflicts and disagreements. Most people have positive attitudes toward the needs in the personal end of the scale and less positive or negative attitudes toward the needs in the impersonal end of the dimension.

Introduction to the Competitive Dimension

The third dimension has been labeled the competitive dimension. (See Motivation System Target Model). We operate in the competitive dimension when a situation calls for the use or development of knowledge, skill, and ability. Needs in the competitive end of the scale motivate us to develop or use knowledge, skill, and ability. Needs in the noncompetitive end of the scale motivate us to avoid competition or to withdraw from a competitive challenge when the risks of failure, harm, or punishment are too great. Competitive success is rewarded by symbols such as grades, titles, and medals, and by respect and admiration. In contrast, winning a combative struggle is usually rewarded by material possessions or control over people and things. Status or recognition obtained by intimidation, force, or manipulation represents combative power rather than competitive ability. The word "compete" originally meant "to meet with." The Greeks would meet with each other and engage in competitive sports. There is often confusion between the words "combative" and "competitive." People will say "he's an aggressive salesman" when they mean "a competitive salesman" (some salesmen are aggressive, however). As stated above, the distinction lies in the goals: material goals for combative motivation; symbolic goals for competitive motivation. Our legal system was designed to convert combative conflicts into more competitive (rational) resolutions. Some events present a mixture of combativeness and competitiveness as when ice hockey players get overly zealous. Most people have positive attitude scores for needs in the competitive end of the dimension and negative scores for needs in the noncompetitive end. The attitude scores are not as definite or strong for the competitive dimension as for the personal-social and combative dimensions.

Some Random Thoughts and Observations

One can reasonably speculate that the strengths of the three PIT dimensions follow the order of phylogenic development. Starting with the most primitive human developmental eras, force and power would be necessary for survival and would thus require a combative motivation dimension. The development of social systems to allow more specialization of activities would call for a personal-social dimension. Personal-social relationships would lead to improved ways of communication resulting in the development of symbolic language. Symbolic language would lead to the accumulation of knowledge requiring a competitive dimension to develop technical skills and abilities.   The stability of the PIT MDS target model is noteworthy. For many years psychologists have been attempting to find reliable personality structures by using factor analysis. The results have been less than heartening. As subject samples change, factors come and go like the shifting sands on an active coast line. The PIT synchronic motivation system dimensional structure has been very stable over several thousand subjects. The reasons for this stability are the synchronic approach to motivation and the systems basis for the PIT. The PIT synchronic motivation system target model is the kind of reliable personality structure psychologists have been seeking. (See Motivation System Target Model). It is here, it has been tested, and its ability to help us understand personality is heartening.

The Picture Identification Test (PIT) is a psychological instrument based on the Murray need system. The PIT uses multidimensional scaling to provide an analysis of needs (motives). It indicates needs that are being met or expressed ineffectively. The PIT can be administered to subjects ages twelve and older.

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The Motivation Analysis web site has three sections:

Motivation Analysis: General Systems Point of View | Combative Dimension | Personal Social Dimension | Competitve Dimension | PIT Scores | PIT Publications | PIT Dissertations | Motivation System Target Model | Target Model Reliability | GPA Predications | Need & Cluster Definitions | Links

Essays: Combative Dominance Syndrome (new) | Political Motivation | Mental Sets | Symbolic Thinking, Values, Motivation & Religion | Needs, Values, Philosophy & Religion

Needs (Motives): Abasement | Achievement | Affiliation | Aggression | Autonomy | Blame Avoidance | Counteraction | Defendance | Deference | Dominance | Exhibition | Gratitude | Harm Avoidance | Inferiority Avoidance | Nurturance | Order | Play | Rejection | Sentience | Sex | Succorance | Understanding

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