Cyber Conflicts: Understanding Motivated Behavior

https://www.coursera.org/learn/cyber-conflicts/lecture/UHZb7/understanding-motivated-behavior


Motivation is one of those terms that most of us believe that we understand fully. However there's many misconceptions about motivation, okay, misconceptions about them. The most common is that motivation is a trait, people tend to think of motivation as individual difference.

Something that people vary in. You're motivated or not. You're highly motivated, weakly motivated. In actuality, it's more appropriate to think of motivation as a state variable. It's something that varies from situation to situation and from time to time.

Now, we may be highly motivated to do our job task in some situations, to do them diligently with the proper care and high effort. And other times in other situations, or other projects, we may be more weakly motivated and do not care that much about being diligent and putting forth high effort. So within ourselves, across time and space, we tend to vary in motivation. So motivation is best seen as a state-variable and not a trait.

In defining motivation, it's probably best to think about the parameters of motivation. What it involves. And if we look at motivated behavior, cyber attacks included, we can see it varying in terms of four different parameters. First, it varies in terms of initiation. What is it that energizes behavior?

It also varies in terms of direction.

What are you attempting to do? Where are you going with this energy?

Finally, it varies in terms of intensity. How energized are you in carrying out those behaviors? And finally, persistence. How long will you try?

So those are the four parameters, initiation, direction, intensity, and persistence. What energizes you, what direction is that energy going, how long will you persist, and at what level of intensity?

To simplify things, I think you can boil these four parameters down to two fundamental questions. And that is what causes behavior? And why does behavior vary in its intensity? In terms of the first question, what causes behavior, this is what psychologists refer to as the content of motivation, okay? And the content of motivation you see in this slide, we think about behavior and look at the causes or the precursors of behavior. We see that the most immediate precursor of behaviors are goals.

We typically have, especially for purposeful behavior, we have an intention or goal, what we want to do, all right? Going back to the cyber attackers, it may be to create havoc. It may be to advance your political cause. Or it may be to steal things. That's your goal.

Where do those goals come from however? They come from needs and drives. Needs are deficiencies. Psychological or physiological. Physiological drive is hunger, for example. When I have gone while without eating, the body sends signals saying, hey, you know what? Go find food. That's the hunger drive. But we also have psychological drives. The drive to master, to achieve, to bond with others. These needs set up drives which are sort of the tendencies. Energic tendencies to act towards our goals. So these are the content of motivation. And there's a lot of different needs and drives that have been hypothesized over the years. It'd be nice to sort of boil that down into sort of some basic fundamental universal human tendencies or drives. And some psychologists make a distinction between two basic drives, motives if you will. One being getting along with others, the other being getting ahead of others.

So many of the different drives and motives that we have can be boiled down and put into one of these two categories. We are social beings. Our species has evolved because of our ability to bond with others, to cooperate, to reciprocate with each other. And that's one of the bases of our communities, which has allowed us to advance as a species.

So much of our behavior is motivated to join groups, to remain in groups, to bond with others.

At the same time, we also, in terms of individual fitness, have survived by getting ahead of others. Competition is sort of ingrained in humans as well. So this notion that we have to acquire things for our own fitness. So we're motivated to compete, or motivated to acquire things that we think will increase our fitness. And if you look at your behavior, much of it can be boiled down into getting along and getting ahead. However, I would add a third category which is particularly relevant, I think, for explaining cyber attacks and cyber crime and hacking and that is mastery. Okay, there's sort of a drive to master our environments. It's sort of the curiosity that most of us have. The desire to learn things, to master our environment.

The old expression curiosity killed the cat, if you have kittens and cats, you know how curious they are. Well we may not be as curious as cats, but we are curious. Place us in new environments, we try to figure them out.

Mastering our environments has helped us to advance as a species as well. So I think if you think of these three basic motives. Getting along, getting ahead, and mastering our environments can explain much about behavior and they can explain behavior in cyber attacks and cyber crime as well