3
From behaviour to activity

First, an important distinction: we must distinguish behaviour from activity.

• – Behaviour is what the subject does, as observed by an external observer.
• – Activity is what the subject does, as experienced from his or her own perspective.

For example, an external observer might describe Saadi’s behaviour as ‘Saadi is walking down the street’, whereas Saadi would describe what he is doing (his activity) as ‘I am returning home from work.’ Clearly, ‘behaviour’ misses important aspects of the subject’s experience.

Because behaviour is a person’s activity as perceived by others, it is behaviour, not activity, that primarily matters to others. From the perspective of others, it is my behaviour (what I do) that needs to be predicted and controlled. For example, what matters to someone driving a car on the road is not what other drivers (and pedestrians) think, nor why they are going somewhere, but what they are actually doing, how they are behaving. That is why the powerful social control systems we alluded to in the previous chapter are mostly designed to control behaviour, not activity: to control what people do, not what they think. When we will build channelling systems, we will do the same: channel behaviour only.

This means, by the way, that what you learn in this book will not enable you to change how people think, only what they do. However, because behaviour is an aspect (in a sense a consequence) of activity, and because activity is performed by the subject and from the subject’s perspective, it is important to understand the determinants of activity if we want to channel behaviour efficiently. Therefore, we will also try to understand what drives people to act, their motives, their goals, the processes they use to move from one step to the next on their course of action, and so on. In short, we want to understand why people act in order to channel what they do.

The following sections provide some useful concepts for analysing the various aspects of activity, putting in simple words the activity theory initiated by Rubinstein and Leontiev and refined by a century of research.1

Motives and goals

People are set in motion by needs, desires and fears; these are a drive to change the current state of things experienced by the subject internally or externally, e.g. to eat, to clean a cluttered and dirty room, to help a relative. So, subjects act driven by ‘motives’ (what sets them in motion). People have the ability to think. That is, they can represent possible situations and states of things in their minds. When driven by a motive, they usually imagine a state of things that satisfies that motive: e.g. a meal, a clean room, a happy friend. This conscious representation of a desired state is a ‘goal’, which they try to reach, driven by the motive.

Many students, and some professors, initially have difficulty understanding the difference between goal and motive, which has been blurred in Western psychology (I was the same, it took me years to understand). However, this distinction is especially important for our purpose here because goals are easy to change, whereas motives are not. Take the motive ‘hunger’. It can be satisfied by different means (e.g. eating a steak, eating noodle soup). You can change the goal (the type of meal), and that is fine, but you cannot suppress the motive unless you satisfy it. You cannot persuade someone to stop being hungry. Feeling hungry, like feeling lonely, sexually aroused, friendly, cold or frustrated, is a biological, animal thing, it is felt; it is not rational, it is part of our bodily nature. And, as we will see in Chapters 7 and 8, motives go far beyond the basic physiological needs: they include social motives, and many socially constructed, ‘cultural’ motives too, which can feel just as strong.

In this book we will have to acknowledge, time and again, however uneasy that makes us feel, that human beings are animals, social animals, and that, even though human beings do not behave only as social animals, they also do behave as such. Considering human beings’ drives and motives, their propensities as bodily creatures, their feelings and desires will be essential to our endeavour as changemakers because we will leverage these propensities in our work. The motive of hunger will drive the hungry person; therefore, if you manage to connect to this motive the behaviour you want the person to perform, you will likely succeed. For example, you can request people to perform a specific type of behaviour to fulfil their motive (e.g. get in line and pay to get food, provide personal details to get a service).

The motive is a feeling of lack of something, a desire to fill this lack by acting. Hunger is a motive. So is professional ambition, or loneliness. So is, when you look at your dirty room or cluttered desk, this feeling of the lack of order and clarity, for which there is no name, but which we all tend to feel sometimes, at least once our teenage years have passed. As long as the motive is salient, it keeps driving the activity in a motivation loop. As soon as the motive fades (e.g. when by eating you have satisfied your hunger), the motivation loop is cut and the activity ends. The motive, like any feeling, is vague and difficult to describe. The goal, on the other hand, is clear. It is a conscious representation of what could fulfil the motive. For example, for hunger, a meal; for ambition, a position; for loneliness, a companion.

To achieve the goal, people will imagine a course of action, a ‘trajectory’ of activity, which will take them from the current state to the final desired state, the goal. This trajectory will take them through steps (subgoals) that gradually bring them closer to the goal. For example, to get a meal, a possible trajectory is: get food, cook, serve and finally eat; to clean a room: make the bed, put scattered things back where they belong, clean the floor. And so on.

These processes are easier to imagine and follow in practice if their path and steps have already been prepared. For example, it will be easy to prepare a meal if we know a shop nearby that sells food, if we have a kitchen with utensils for cooking and a table for serving food. These trajectories are also easier to navigate if the person has the right competence: if one knows where the shop is, how to cook food, and so on. And even better if the same trajectory has already been experienced in the past: the first time you clean a room, you must discover how to do it in the easiest way, for example, which is the best plug for the vacuum cleaner, etc. The next time you clean the room, you can quickly re-use the proven solution, which then becomes a solution ‘by default’.

The path usually has many steps. Some behaviour trajectories can be short, for example, going out for lunch. Some trajectories may take years, such as access to a prominent social position that satisfies multiple motives (livelihood, recognition, security, power). In societies, and even more so in large societies, the steps in the trajectory that one must take to achieve the goal can be complicated and sometimes appear as detours. These ‘detours’ are other activities that have no obvious or immediate connection with the final goal. For example, to reach a high social position, one may have to go through education, hard work and all the rest.

It is important to remember the following structure: the motive (a generic need) ‘drives’ the subject to undertake the activity. Then, the subject tries to achieve a specific goal that he believes would satisfy the motive. A goal is the final step of the trajectory; it directs behaviour. This is why we speak of ‘goal-directed behaviour’. Activity theory summarizes this by saying that ‘the activity is driven by the motive and directed to the goal’.

At each step of a trajectory, the subject considers motives and goals, as well as the conditions given by the environment at that point. This process is ‘orientation’: considering the situation and choosing a course of action. For example, when I arrive at the cafeteria, I will look at the menu and, given the menu, my degree of hunger, and my initial goal (to eat a salad, to have finished lunch at 13:00), considering those ‘conditions given’ I will choose what to take. In doing so, I may change my initial goal slightly if what I had in mind is not on the menu. My motive is hunger, my goal is to have eaten a salad before 13:00, and the conditions given are the available menu and my food preferences. All these contribute to orient my behaviour into a course of action that will bring the next step in my trajectory of activity.

The difference between goal and motive is key for our purpose. Indeed, if you want to change behaviour, it is relatively easy to change goals, but it is difficult to suppress a motive. Consider thermal comfort: you can change the goal (wear a pullover or switch on the heating), but you cannot suppress the need for body warmth – unless you satisfy it. So, the changemaker should always try to understand the motives underlying the subject’s goals. This will open consideration of a set of acceptable alternative goals to which the subject can be redirected and still be satisfied. Keep this in mind: one easy way to change behaviour is to understand the motivation and simply provide either one easier way to achieve...