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Motivation

‘Motivation reconsidered’ reconsidered

Nature Reviews Psychology volume 4, page 686 (2025)Cite this article

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Picture a toddler hopping down the sidewalk on one foot or leaping into every puddle as if each splash were a personal record to beat. This child is enjoying activities that seem to serve no purpose. Robert White’s 1959 paper offers a compelling explanation for why this might be the case that was revolutionary for its time and remains remarkably relevant today.

White challenged the dominant theories of his time — drive-reduction theory and psychoanalytic instinct theory — which reduced human motivation to basic biological drives such as food and water. These theories cannot account for behaviours that do not seem to satisfy any biological need, such as when babies systematically test how to produce sounds from rattles, monkeys work at puzzles without food rewards, or well-fed rats explore novel maze sections.

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  • Fascendini, B., Zhao, B. & Vélez, N. Are two-year-olds intrinsically motivated to explore their own competence? In Proc. Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society https://escholarship.org/uc/item/38z2w881 (2025)

  • Ten, A., Kaushik, P., Oudeyer, P. Y. & Gottlieb, J. Humans monitor learning progress in curiosity-driven exploration. Nat. Commun. 12, 5972 (2021)

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  1. Department of Psychology, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA

    Bella Fascendini

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  1. Bella Fascendini
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Correspondence to Bella Fascendini.

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Fascendini, B. ‘Motivation reconsidered’ reconsidered. Nat Rev Psychol 4, 686 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s44159-025-00502-5

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