In the early twentieth century, Atkinson noted that
psychology was a young science at the time, and that it had only been within
the past few years that the topic had garnered any interest at all in
commercial affairs. Psychology was
considered a very immature academic subject and as such it was (justly) regarded
as an academic bauble with no importance to real-world affairs.
However, it was the methodology of the psychologists that
soured business on psychology – Freud, Jung, and others of that time took a
fanciful approach to the subject, and their “study” on the topic seemed more in
the nature of mythology and mysticism than science. More sober minds had more rational
approaches to the topic, but the field itself was poisoned by the shamans of
psychology. Those who paid attention
realized that behind the showmanship was something of genuine importance: the
study of human behavior and its motivations.
All business is based on the interactions among people. The buildings, machinery, and ledgers were
all merely vehicles through which people interacted with one another. In essence, a business consists of a core
group of people (the employees of the firm) interacting with other groups of
people (suppliers, investors, customers, regulators, etc.) to pursue their
mutual interests, recognized and motivated by their desires. Given this, it is more than merely
beneficial to understand how people think and what motivates them to take
action – it is foundational.
It was also during the early twentieth century that
psychology became prescient. Until then,
the means by which most people survived was an interaction between man and
nature – while some commerce existed, the majority of the world’s population
existed by struggling to extract the means of survival from nature. Commerce and trade had existed for centuries,
and industrialism had begun a few centuries earlier, but the majority of things
that most people consumed were fashioned from raw materials in their own
households. To have something required
the knowledge of making it.
Over many years, this changed, and in the present day few
people make things for their own consumption, but instead make things to trade
with others to obtain the items they need to consume, and the method of
survival has far less to do with the interaction between man and things (though
this is ultimately necessary for consumer goods to be fashioned) and more to do
with the interaction between man and his fellow men. The number of people whose work requires
physical contact with the product has dwindled, and they are far surpassed by
the number of people whose primary work requires contact with other people.
Previous studies of human behavior had focused on observable
physical actions (praxeology) without considering the internal motivations – or
at best, these motivations were speculated upon based on the premise that they
were related strictly to the functional consequences of the action
(teleology). That is: a person takes
action because they desire to achieve the consequences of that action,
therefore the sum total of their motivations would be predicated on those that
would lead to an effective and efficient outcome.
In all, this was a good start, but woefully insufficient to
describe human behavior – which is at its core emotional and irrational, and
reasoning is later applied to justify or explain it. The cognitive school of psychology, which is
presently in its youth, if not infancy, makes a more serious effort to
understand motivation on the emotional and precognitive effort.
The difficulty of analysis is compounded by the economic
progress of society: in the present day, the majority of effort and money spent
is no longer in pursuit of the basic survival needs of mankind. Food, shelter, and clothing no longer require
the majority of individual or societal resources, and as a consequence
psychological needs that are based on things other than functional necessity
motivate the majority of human behavior.
Things have only been thus for a few decades in developed
countries, though by the mid-twentieth or early twenty-first century, mankind
may have reached yet another tipping point at which survival requires so little
effort that it may be taken for granted, and that non-functional needs that are
entirely psychological are the primary focus, and delivering upon them the
primary motivational force for human effort.
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