GENEX-INTERACTIF

Our needs and wants make up our motivation, the force that draws our attention to certain objects and makes us act in certain ways. Motivation helps explain why people behave as they do.’ Therefore, motivation is important to both persuasive and informative speeches. People will listen, learn, and remember a message only if it relates to their needs, wants, or wishes. Understanding motivation can also help a speaker appeal to the common humanity in listeners that crosses cultural boundaries.
Motives can vary in importance according to the person, situation, and culture. People are motivated by what they don’t have that they need or want. If you have recently moved to a new town, your need to make friends may attract you to places where you can meet others. Even when needs are satisfied, people respond to wants. Suppose you have just eaten a very filling meal. You’re not hungry, but if someone enters the room with a plate of warm, freshly baked cookies, the sight and smell can make you want some.
The study of human motivation has had an interesting history within twentieth-century psychology. Social scientists first concentrated on identifying the different types of motivation. In a pioneering study published during the 1930s, Henry A. Murray and his associates at the Harvard Psychological Clinic identified more than twenty-five different human needs.Later, another research pioneer, Abraham Maslow, arranged needs in a five-level hierarchy beginning with the most basic physiological needs and culminating in self-actualization needs. Contemporary psychologists now argue that almost all motivations, even needs that seem purely social in nature, express a central preoccupation with the self. Therefore, they contend that our most basic needs are to understand and control the world around us in order to protect and enhance our self hood. Beyond these general master needs, people may also have quite powerful, more specific physical, social, and personal needs. These needs often become motivational themes and appeals in speeches.
To get an idea of motivation as it actually surfaces in classroom speeches, we looked at more than a hundred speeches presented in recent years by students at the Universities of California-Davis, Indiana, Memphis, and Vanderbilt. We identified seven motives that were often used in those speeches: understanding, control, health and safety, nurturance and altruism, friends and family, self-actualization, and the desire for fairness.

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