Abstract
There is a long history of thought and research in the social sciences that views human beings as engaged in entirely instrumental activities in pursuit of goals that typically give them pleasure, and presumably, happiness. This view can be contrasted with Aristotle’s “eudaimonic” view that real happiness comes from the pursuit and achievement of excellence, with excellence understood as achieving a telos specific to and appropriate to each activity. In this chapter, we argue for Aristotle’s view in distinguishing instrumental from internal motives. The pursuit of consequences that bear an intimate relation to the activities themselves (internal motives), while often not pleasurable, yields lasting effects on well-being that instrumental consequences typically do not. We discuss both laboratory research and field studies, including a longitudinal study of West Point cadets, in support of our arguments. We suggest that the often-made distinction between “intrinsic” and “extrinsic” motivation fails to capture adequately the complexity of the relations between the things people do and their reasons for doing them.
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Notes
- 1.
But not all parents. One of us (A.W.) was thrilled when her daughter’s veteran kindergarten teacher – with more than 25 years of experience honing her craft –explained at back to school night that she had little interest in the regimented, test-directed instructional system at use in the school, and instead planned to teach as she always had, with a single goal to guide her. That goal? “To make your children love learning.” She assured us that all the rest would follow, which it did, in abundance, that year. Here was, quite clearly, a teacher dedicated to the telos of her practice.
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Schwartz, B., Wrzesniewski, A. (2016). Internal Motivation, Instrumental Motivation, and Eudaimonia. In: Vittersø, J. (eds) Handbook of Eudaimonic Well-Being. International Handbooks of Quality-of-Life. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-42445-3_8
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