-2

Thanks for taking the effort to read this post! As not being a psychologist or neuroscientist, but an engineer I want to study the mechanisms of (human) motivation. The goal is to be more able to identify what the drivers of motivation are of myself and other people in order to be more effective and better able to understand the actions of other people.

The best source would probably a book, ideally a source that starts with first principles. In terms of difficulty I would prefer a book not much more challenging than "Thinking Fast and Slow", since I am not well trained in processing literature in this field. However, if there is a possible very good but difficult source, I'm up for a challenge.

Some personal situations that made me question motivation mechanisms

  • Why I sometimes have no motivation to do the dishes and sometimes is goes easy while the task stayed constant.
  • Why my motivation is not impacted to go for a run when it's raining, but it severly is when I need to buy groceries

Question:

  • What are usefull authors/titles to study the mechanisms of (human) motivation?
Tim
  • 99
  • 2
  • 1
    Welcome to Psychology.SE. What resource may be considered good can be very different to another person's view. Therefore this question is very much opinion-based. For more detail, read about the StackExchange guidelines for great subjective questions and their blog post about how real questions have answers. – Chris Rogers Apr 02 '23 at 09:56
  • There are other similar questions such as https://psychology.stackexchange.com/q/16742/7604. For more, see the motivation tag. Also, to highlight my previous comment, the Drive Theory element of my answer at https://psychology.stackexchange.com/a/17211/7604 covers some resources although some here consider it to be pseudoscientific. – Chris Rogers Apr 02 '23 at 10:03

1 Answers1

1

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi is considered to be the father of the field of Positive Psychology, and introduced the notion of "Flow" when studying happiness and motivation.

While Mihaly focused on studying happiness, the concept of flow is highly related to motivation, and how to reach it. I was about to copy paste some excerpts from the Wikipedia page about Flow, but you better read it directly from the source: it is very well explained there!

Mihaly's 1990 book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience is quite well written and accessible to non professionals. [Note that I did not find his TED talk very representative of his work, should you be thinking about watching it instead of reading the book.]

Hope it helps!

J..y B..y
  • 807
  • 1
  • 5
  • 21