Surviving Not Enough of a Motivation?

According to the text, motive comes from a French word, motif, which means causing to move. Motivation gives us a reason to act. For everyone in survivor, motivation is definitely not something that is missing. Most members are after the extrinsic reward of winning the price money, which satisfies our most basic needs including our physiological and safety needs.

In today’s challenge, Reed and Natalie, the last two standing during the challenge proved that they were still motivated by immunity and ultimately willing Survivor. However, Natalie, like the others who voluntarily stepped down, were tempted by other basic need and chose the basic need of food over immunity.

Although I do not think any of the survivor players are ultimately being motivated by intrinsic reward, throughout the challenges, we see that some thrive on intrinsic rewards that come from the need for praise and recognition. For example, Missy and her daughter are constantly verbally encouraging each other throughout challenges. Jaclyn is also very motivated by Jon. For example, in this episode they disclosed that she could not have children and they longing to adopt- another basic need. I am confident that if the finalist were down to Jon and Jaclyn, she would easily give up her spot for Jon just for the intrinsic reward.

Since survivor is close to being an individual game at this point, we have not seen optimal group experience however, we somewhat saw this with Reed’s alliance. Optimal group experience is when members are highly committed and inspired to accomplish a common goal, in this case it was to vote Jon out. Although they all stuck to the plan and were committed and inspired to vote Jon, it did not work the way they planned because Keith was not as inspired to play along when he felt threaten by Reeds comment. He blew it with his comment to Reed, causing Jon to play immunity.

In Survivor, there is plenty of motivation to work however; it might not be in the warm, fuzzy group feeling.