Research by Richard Chapman and Paul Lawrence "Driven;How Human Nature Shapes our Choices" suggests that recent brain research demonstrates four drives for human behaviuor. These are the drive to aquire, the drive to bond, the drive to comprehend and the drive to defend. I haven't read the book, just a brief article in People Management magazine, encouraging organisations to provide opportunities for employees to excercise these drives.
I'll probably get the book, so will do a review (at some point !). Thought it was interesting to ponder could we extrapolate and suggest horses may be motivated by the same/similar drives ?
Sorry, I've been meaning to reply to this thread for a while. Please don't think the delay meant I wasn't interested. I was!
I'd be really interested to hear more about the book as it seemed an odd hypothesis to me. I know I'm a contrary old cow but I immediately started thinking of situations which straddle these (supposedly?) discrete boundaries.
So if you take something like a feeling of security, which both we and horses presmably all want to have and will be driven to obtain. It's something we want to acquire, we will typically acquire it through bonding with other people, we will need to understand how to do this and the reason we do this is in order to feel defended against anything adversive. And different people/horses will place different emphasis in different places.
That's a little contrived, I admit, but I also feel that the concept of trying to pigeonhole our emotions is equally contrived and speaks to me of a human desire to control everything rather than just to allow things to happen.
I agree it is really important to understand motivation. How can we hope to have a remote chance of working with positive reinforcement if we fail to understand what drives us and our horses? But I think if we try to put everything into categories and make everything too rigid we are in danger of losing that individual approach which we need, whether looking at our own behaviour or that of our horses.
I hope this doesn't come across too negatively(!). I'm genuinely interested in why they come up with these categories and am sure that much of what I've said above is misguided due to my lack of understanding of what they really meant. So I'd really like to hear your opinions on what I've said
I'm with you here in feeling (though of course one can't judge without actually reading the book) that this could result in too rigid a 'pigeonholing' of drives and motivations. I'd love to know what dear old Mary Midgley with her razor-sharp mind would make of it; as she says in her excellent book, 'Beast & Man', ‘...if we are to understand the behavior of conscious beings, we must take their motives seriously and not try to reduce them to something else.’
All the same. I'd be interested to learn what the authors have to say and will certainly read this book.