/sci/ - Science & Math

>>11285319
>no mystery in the nature of the rich variety of phenomenons you call motivations.

As many of us ask, "why do I... (do something)", there is many more behaviors for which we never ask that question; the answer seems self-evident. But this is just a feature of the mind, making it possible to act without having to do complicated cost benefit analyses with a hundred different variables objectively weighted. This is all hidden from our conscious mind in a convenient way. We're the audience watching a trick being done and the magician in one.

Humans engage in post-hoc rationalizations to explain our behaviors and it works well enough because reasoning doesn't have to be internally self-justifying, just acceptable enough to allow us to stop trying to figure it out. We tend to come up with the best, most flattering justifications for our behaviors, but science has shown all of this rationalization occurs after the fact, and isn't objectively true in any sense, even though it may feel 100% justified. That feeling of being sure, feeling justified, IS one of the intrinsic motivators behind behavior, even the behavior of trying to determine why we do what we do. So people spontaneously arrive at the most flattering, most convenient reasons, and deem them sufficient. Unless you really interrogate someone about their behaviors we have a built-in tendency to tell ourselves what we want to hear. So a therapist has to really dig into a person's experience, with their help (and sometimes without) to produce a more exact, more accurate motivation. If you don't have a handle on the real motivations, you probably won't change the apparent behavior.