Understanding Human Motivation: What Makes People Tick?

Understanding Human Motivation is a lively presentation of how factors such as biological nature, instinct, past experience, and society determine what we do. Donald Laming draws on laboratory experiments, social surveys, and a large and varied collection of anecdotes to explore the driving forces behind many different domains of human behavior, both individual and social. The book not only discusses such obvious topics as fear, sex, boredom, rage, and money, but also covers underlying issues such as free will, consciousness, the psychological basis of ethics, and the extent to which behavior is shaped by the society into which we are born and the people around us. The discussion is illustrated throughout by real-life examples that relate psychological theory to what people do in their everyday lives.