What Motivates Humans?

Some thoughts on Economic Man, Status Man, Sociological Man, and Darwinian Man

Many disciplines try to reduce human motivation to a single dimension. For example, economists model humans as maximizing individual utility. This is the notorious Economic Man.

Economic Man is self-interested. He just wants more stuff. In a Hobbesian world, he tries to take your stuff and tries to keep you from taking his stuff. It is not even a zero-sum game, because the effort we put into protecting our stuff and trying to take other people’s stuff serves to subtract from the available stuff.

But suppose that we develop norms and institutions that protect property rights. When we want someone else’s stuff, we have to undertake voluntary exchange. Then we can play a positive-sum game, the game of specialization and trade. The cumulative outcome of this game is that we have in the 21st century way more stuff than people could have dreamed of hundreds of years ago.

But what if getting more stuff is not the ultimate driver of human behavior? In particular, what if people care most about status, especially status relative to people close to them?

Unlike the game of getting more stuff, the game of status cannot be arranged to be played in a positive-sum manner. Status is measured in relative terms. If my status goes up relative to you, then your status goes down relative to me.

When you look on Twitter to see how many followers you have or how many likes your Tweet received, chances are you are caught up in a status game. It is not really the absolute numbers that matter to you. It is the numbers relative to some benchmark. If I benchmark myself against Razib Khan or Noah Smith, I feel ashamed of my low status.

You would think that someone higher in the status hierarchy would get satisfaction out of looking down at the people below, but that is not how status motivation works. Instead, people commonly benchmark themselves against people with higher status, and so they typically feel badly about it. The adjunct professor is annoyed that he is not on the tenure track, the associate professor is annoyed that he doesn’t have tenure, the tenured professor is annoyed that he isn’t at Harvard, the Harvard professor is annoyed that he has not been awarded the Nobel Prize, and so on. Even Nobel Prize winners are dissatisfied, wanting even more status.

Perceptions of status affect our interactions with other people. Randall Collins has proposed that what we care most about is the emotional energy that we derive from these interactions. Emotional energy comes from more than just our sense of status. I call Collins’ theory of motivation Sociological Man. Sociological man wants a sense that other people care about him, support him, and participate in joint efforts with him. Economic man goes to the office to complete tasks and earn money. Sociological man goes to the office to be part of a team.

But if we are going to have a reductionist account of human motivation, why not reach all the way back to biology, and the theory of evolution? Darwinian Man has selfish genes that want to reproduce. You cannot reproduce if you do not have enough stuff, so you cannot avoid being Economic Man to some extent. Your chances of finding a good mate depend on your status, so you are bound to obey the instincts of Status Man. And you need to have positive interactions with the people around you, so you have to behave like Sociological Man.

In conclusion, I think of humans as playing many games. These games become much more complex and subtle as the scale of society increases from small bands to groups larger than the Dunbar number, all the way to nations. Moreover, I think that the Internet and social media have altered the playing field for these games. There used to be a stronger separation between: the intimate world of our friends, family, and co-workers on the one hand; vs. the remote world of politicians and celebrities on the other hand. Now, on our smart phones we find celebrities acting like our friends and our friends acting like celebrities.

This essay is part of a series on human interdependence.