Social behavior is goal-oriented

Regarding social behavior as goal-oriented phenomena motivated by self-interest, people interact to achieve goals and satisfy needs (Kenrick, Neuberg, & Cialdini, 2007). Viewed from a cognitive perspective, the situation triggers the individual’s conscious goal setting. The learning perspective sees that experience influences the individual to pursue some goals and avoid others. The evolutionary perspective sees goals as social motivations passed down from ancestors to ensure the species' survival.

The fundamental motivations driving social behavior include the following:

• Survival. To establish social ties that will ensure survival.
• Relations. To understand the self in relation to others. This allows people to manage better the self and enhance social survival.
• Status. To gain and maintain social status. From an evolutionary perspective, status facilitated survival by providing access to food and shelter. This need motivates people to present themselves positively to others to enhance respect and admiration.
• Defense. To defend themselves and the people they value. Pursuing this goal enhances survival by strengthening families, enhancing friendships, supporting communities, and building nations. The need can also influence prejudice and violence against people, groups, and nations that threaten things people value.
• Procreation. To attract and retain a mate serves. Kenrick, et al. (2007) listed this as at the bottom of the needs, but evolutionary perspectives see reproducing genes as the primary social behavior goal.

At first glance, the motivational goals listed by Kenrick et al. (2007) seem similar to the motivational needs identified by humanist psychologists. However, more careful consideration helps clarify significant differences between humanist psychology and social psychology. In his holistic, dynamic hierarchy of needs theory, Abraham Maslow (1987) categorized motivational needs as a dynamic interaction among survival, safety, love and belonging, esteem, self-actualization, and self-transformation. He considered survival, safety, belongingness, and esteem as deficiency needs because he believed these factors did not motivate people unless they were deficient in that area.

For example, the individual is not motivated to eat unless he or she is hungry; likewise, the individual who has fulfilled deficiency needs pursues individual growth needs or transcends self to serve a cause other than oneself. In contrast, rather than seeing survival and belongingness as separate motivations, the social psychologist sees that survival is dependent on belonging.

As summarized by Kenrick et al. (2007), “Without their friends, our ancestors would have died” (p. 13). Additional similarities in the philosophies are as follows: The social psychology goals of understanding self in relation to others and gaining social status goals align with Maslow’s esteem need. The social psychology goal of defending self and circle falls simultaneously under Maslow’s safety and esteem needs. The need to attract a mate falls simultaneously under Maslow’s love and belongingness need and physiological need.

Maslow’s proposal that the purpose of human motivation is to grow toward self-actualization offers a glaring difference between the models. Beyond self-actualization, the human strives to transcend self to fulfill potential as an “ideal, authentic or perfect or godlike human being" (1968, p. 11). In contrast, social psychology assumes that self-interest, as found in Maslow’s deficiency needs, motivates all social behavior. The higher-order growth needs from humanist psychology—self-actualization and self-transformation—earn no mention in social psychology literature. In social psychology, individual and societal existence and well-being are interdependent (Kenrick, Neuberg, & Cialdini, 2007).