Motivation, preferences and conditioning our behaviour (Part 1)

One month ago, I attended a conference about the accessibility for older people. There was a presentation which I like very much. It was done by Sergio Sayago from Universitat Pompeu Fabra, and he said that the older people don’t want to feel different, and the most important factor is the motivation. If we find the motivation, the person automatically develop his/her abilities for getting his/her goals, maybe the process is longer or shorter but at the end, he/she gets the goal.

After reading a bit of this field, watching some TV documentaries, and talking with people (for instance, really useful conversations with Fernando a post-doc in psychology at KULeuven) , it seems that our thinking process is simpler than the people think usually. But maybe the problem is the meaning of the words, there are sometimes that we misunderstand the words. I remember when I was studying a master of marketing which started with the sentence “The marketing doesn’t create needs”. The argument was that the needs are well defined as human that we are, for instance, they referenced the Maslow’s pyramid, afterwards we had a discussion about it, and my unique conclusion was that there were different understandings for this word. However if we wanted to progress in this field, we should agree the meaning of this word. At the end, it was true, the marketing didn’t create needs, but it participates in the process for getting our needs.

The key is that we have needs, for instance, in the first layer of the Maslow’s pyramid, we can find the more primitive needs, and we have clear that if we don’t have resources for covering them, we’ll try it by all the possible ways like the most primitive animals. The theory of a lot of physiologists is that this process is repeated in every layer of the pyramid, only changes de context, and, of course, our background, because we have had to cover other needs and once time that we have covered these needs, other needs appear, for instance, in a different layer.

From my point of view, the key of all these words is that we have a really simple thinking process, maybe the complexity is to know how we are growing in the pyramid.

Now, I’ll try to explain why I have talked about all these things. Motivation and preferences are two concepts that they are not strictly linked. The concept of preferences is a concept very influenced by a social context, where is very important taking into a consideration a lot of factors that they are really difficult to consider because neither the user knows (usually, because the user is not conscious in this process, for instance, the marketing). Then, we have preferences that the motivation involve on them is weak, because they are not got in a natural way, for this reason, in a marketing environment is needed that the commercial strategy participate in all the environment, however in a learning environment is really difficult consider all this information, because we don’t participate in this commercial strategy.

The conclusion is, from my point of view, that the information provided by the user is not really useful, and trying to understand it, is a strategy top down, and if the theory that we are growing using a simple process of thinking, maybe we should follow a bottom-up strategy.

For this reason, I consider really important the tracking of the user when he/she interacts with the applications, because forgotten the context of the interaction, similar behaviour patterns can mean, similar user profiles. Of course, it has reasoning, but I’ll try to write it other day.