(Originally posted February 5, 2024)
Psychology, as a discipline, tends to go through waves of “big” and “small” thinking. Whenever it swings back to the “big” thinking time periods, we often see a return to some of the most basic, foundational questions about what underlies most (and perhaps all) of human psychology. To be even more accurate: all psychology across all members of the animal kingdom.
Over the past 150 years, we can see several periods of serious return to, and departure from, an absolutely key discussion point in the social sciences: Darwinian evolution. You’re all incredibly smart and thoughtful, so I won’t bore you with a ham-fisted retelling of evolutionary theory. But, really, the key talking point of evolutionary theory that we all know is this — in order for a species to survive in the long term, it has to survive in the short term. In practical terms, this means that we are well-served by propensities to avoid or escape harmful or noxious things in our environment, and approach things that are helpful or beneficial in some way. This basic idea is perhaps most often recognized in psychology, in its various forms, by infamous names like “hedonic motivation” or “the pleasure principle.”
There has long been a focus on approach-versus-avoidance motivations in the field, with several periods of truly inspired empirical research over the decades conducted by some of the most forward-thinking and truly genius scholars that Psychology has ever seen. Great minds have come and gone, and many of the greatest have focused extensively on precisely this most basic of processes — what causes people to approach versus avoid some… thing in their environment? In many views, this question is quite literally the key underpinning of all thought, feeling, and behavior. It applies equally to rats, chickens, insects, etc., as it does humans, and seems to be one of the most basic ways in which we can characterize all animal behavior. (You could apply similar ideas to non-animal organisms like microbes, but that’s a bit of a stretch if we’re talking about psychological principles).
If approach and avoidance are so genuinely foundational to psychology, we should see evidence for this across theories and psychological domains, right? Right. As it so happens, that’s precisely what today’s RIP is all about. Elliot and Thrash published this 2002 paper in JPSP laying out, in great and masterful detail, how several other psychological domains in the personality space should (and do) map onto the constructs of approach and avoidance motivations.
This is a genuinely key reading for anyone interested in personality, behavior, cognition, neuropsych, social psych, developmental psych, clinical psych… really any branch of psychology has something to take home from this paper.
Please enjoy Elliot and Thrash’s outstanding paper, Approach-avoidance motivation in personality.
Elliot, A. J., & Thrash, T. M. (2002). Approach-avoidance motivation in personality: Approach and avoidance temperaments and goals. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 82(5), 804–818. https://doi.org/10.1037//0022-3514.82.5.804
This is one of many, many seminal papers by authors Andrew Elliot and Todd Thrash on topics of motivation, goals, and beyond — if you like this work, then there is a huge, truly inconceivably large rabbit hole to fall into on the topic.
**Fun Fact: The first study that I ever published was on the very topic of approach-versus-avoidance. I have been oddly thrilled to see it cited by others in their research on chickens and dolphins.