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www.thesolutionsjournal.org | January-February 2014 | Solutions | 31
Perspectives
Twenty-six year-old Robert
Champion was a proud drum
major in the famed Florida A&M
University’s marching band, until
one night his band members turned
on him. On November 19, 2011,
Champion participated in a band
ritual called “crossing bus C” in which
he had to try and make his way to the
back of the bus while being kicked
and punched by other band members.
The game turned deadly, and within
an hour, Champion died from internal
bleeding. Thirteen band members
have been charged with manslaughter.
As a society, incidents like these
baffle and distress us. Why do people
do things like this to themselves and
others? But as a psychologist, I see a
silver lining. Such irrational behavior
points to a deep psychological power
which—if harnessed—might be
cause for hope. People will suffer and
sacrifice for causes and groups that
they care about. Sustainability could
be such a cause.
Consider as a contrast the assump-
tions made by many pessimists about
the environmental crisis: people are
too driven by self-interest to make the
kinds of changes required to create
a sustainable society. Politicians,
activists, and the lay public all assume
that people ask “what’s in it for me?”
first and foremost. They also assume
that “what’s in it for me?” is narrowly
defined by economic self-interest. In
his analysis of the “tragedy of the com-
mons,” Garrett Hardin1 clearly makes
this assumption, as his solution to this
presumed state of affairs is “mutual
coercion, mutually agreed upon.”
From this perspective, we cannot
count on people to do the right thing
unless forced to.
Luckily, this paradigm is wrong,
or at least incomplete. The rational
economic actor model simply does
not describe the majority of human
behavior. Certainly, people are some-
times greedy, sometimes unwilling
to be inconvenienced. And people
are undoubtedly motivated and
influenced by self-interest under many
circumstances. But the sources of this
motivation—or the ways in which
people seek to fulfill it—are rarely
rational, and only sometimes in line
with economic self-interest.
Self-interest models completely
fail to explain the behavior of Chris
Burgess, a truck driver who in 2012
drove his out-of-control rig into the
Cuyahoga River rather than let it plow
into a shopping mall full of people; he
drowned, but no one else died. Self-
interest models do not explain why
Christians smuggled Jews out of Nazi
Europe, or why 115 Tibetans recently
immolated themselves to protest
Chinese rule.
The lesson is clear: Individuals will
do inconvenient, painful, and even
deadly things that are not in their eco-
nomic or biological best interest for
people, groups, values and causes they
care about. Only the most powerful
motivators could drive such behavior.
We need to understand these motivations.
We need to harness that power for the
cause of creating a sustainable world.
Like all animals, humans are
powerfully motivated to engage in
behaviors that allow us to survive
Tapping into Core Social Motives to Drive Sustainability Transformation
by Cynthia McPherson Frantz
Jesslee Cuizon / Flickr
A core social motive for people is the overarching need is to belong, to be part of a social group. Hanami or Flower Viewing is the Japanese traditional
custom of enjoying the beauty of flowers.
32 | Solutions | January-February 2014 | www.thesolutionsjournal.org
Perspectives
and reproduce. Hunger, thirst, and sex
are core biological motives—motives
that will certainly drive behavior as
humans struggle to adapt to climate
destabilization and the resulting
threats to food, water, and shelter. In
many ways the “rational economic
actor,” which assumes that action is
largely driven by economic self-inter-
est, is an extension of basic biological
motives with money serving as the
vehicle for satisfying desires.
The biological motives are quite
limited in their ability to motivate
climate mitigation behavior, however.
Climate change is chronic, pervasive,
and large scale, and understanding the
need for mitigation requires thinking
far into the future and across the
globe. The biological motives drive
behavior that is immediate and local.
By the time you are hungry or thirsty
because of the effects of climate
change, you are no longer in a position
to address mitigation.
Luckily, humans evolved an addi-
tional survival strategy that equally
drives our behavior: the strategy of
living in cooperative social groups.
Humans are social creatures. For our
ancestors, the group meant survival;
anyone who was not motivated to pre-
serve and protect their membership
in their group would have perished.
As a result, humans also evolved a
set of social motives that were just
as essential for survival—and just as
powerfully motivating—as the core
biological motives. Those motives are
still with us and drive our behavior in
fundamental ways.
Social psychologist Susan Fiske2
articulates five core social motives
that have robust empirical support
for their importance. The overarch-
ing need is to belong, to be part of a
social group. Even now, when our
physical survival is not directly
dependent upon membership in a
group (if your family disowns you,
you can still go to the grocery store
and buy food), we respond to social
ostracism with intense psychological
and physical distress. In fact, research
by Kip Williams and Steve Nida3
demonstrates that we experience
this distress in the same part of the
brain—the dorsal anterior cingulate
cortex—that registers physical pain.
Rejection hurts.
In the service of the need to belong,
humans pursue four other goals:
• We are powerfully motivated to
understand our world, to feel like we
can predict what will happen and
that it all will makes sense.
• We also need to feel like we have
some control, that we can execute
plans and achieve goals.
• We need to have some basic level of
esteem for ourselves, a feeling that
we are worthy.
• We need to trust others, to feel like
the world is basically a benevolent
place.
As with biological motives, the
need to fulfill core social motives
drives humans to exhibit self-inter-
ested behavior. However, this is not
self-interest in the classical economic
or even narrowly biological sense.
Indeed, there is often a discrepancy
between the kind of self-interest that is
driven by the core social motives and
self-interest as predicted by rational
economic and biological motives
models. Consider fashion: what is
rational about discarding last year’s
style because the editor of Vogue
says it’s not “in”? Nothing. However,
when one considers the importance of
self-esteem and belonging, the drive
to dress in a similar way as your social
group is more understandable.
But don’t forget: these motives have
been fundamental in the enormous
success of our species. There is great
potential for aligning the self-interests
that stem from satisfying these
motives with efforts to establish a
sustainable human existence on this
planet. Indeed, we ignore them at our
peril. For sustainability practitioners,
the core social motives have at least
four lessons to teach:
1. Recognize the underlying need(s)
driving resistance behavior. It is not
just that corporations are greedy and
profit-driven, or that governments
and bureaucracies are rigid and
inflexible (although they often are).
They are also peopled with human
beings who are powerfully motivated
to belong within their institutions,
to succeed within the system that
rewards them, to maintain control
over their assets, to preserve their
understanding of the way the world
works, and to feel like they can trust
those around them to help them meet
these goals. Challenging the corpo-
rate or government structure is not
just taking money and power away
from institutions; it is shaking the
psychological lifelines of the people
who work in them. Why should they
be happy about that? Why should
they cooperate? Would you?
As we rebuild our world, we must
always remember that the systems
that are leading to our destruction are
also the very systems that currently
fulfill vital psychological needs,
albeit poorly and in an unsustainable
way. Resistance to the psychological
threat posed by making deep systemic
changes is a reality we must contend
with. As we work towards a decent
sustainable future, we must do so with
a constant eye towards managing this
resistance with foresight, respect, and
compassion.
Master negotiators Roger Fisher
and William Ury point out that
when dealing with recalcitrant
others we often think “solving their
problem is their problem.”4 Yet if
www.thesolutionsjournal.org | January-February 2014 | Solutions | 33
Perspectives
we need those others to be part of
the solution, their problem is our
problem too. As we challenge and
change unsustainable systems and
institutions, we must do so in a way
that acknowledges the problem that
arises when others lose a sense of
understanding, control, trust, and
esteem. Our change efforts must
have built into them efforts to meet
these needs in new ways.
These efforts will be particularly
challenging when dealing with
fundamentalists of all stripes—lit-
eralist Christians and Muslims,
arch-Conservatives, fanatic envi-
ronmentalists. Fundamentalism is
essentially extreme rigidity about
how core social motives are met,
particularly understanding and
control. Can concerted efforts to
address these needs in other ways
make fundamentalists more pliable?
It remains to be seen.
2. Make the threat to core needs
visible, and then make clear that
sustainability is the answer to this
threat. Preserving a habitable planet
is indisputably essential to preserv-
ing all the things that people care
passionately about—not just their
basic biological needs, but also their
culture, their loved ones, equity and
justice, the beauty of the natural
world. However, modern society
currently masks the ties between
the biophysical world that sustains
us and our core physical and social
needs (see Petersen et al. in this issue
for a fuller discussion of this point).
As the stories above make clear, indi-
viduals will in fact suffer and sacrifice
for people and causes they care about.
We need to make the threat to their
needs that our current system poses
as clear as possible, and make people
realize that sustainability is the way
to defend against that threat.
Unfortunately, the environmental
movement has not been uniformly
successful at conveying the threat to
those who are not liberal, white, and
upper-middle class. Conservatives do
not yet see the threat to the things
they hold dear—intact families,
economic stability, freedom of choice.
People of color and members of low-
income communities are faced with
other, more immediate problems—
daily discrimination, putting food
on the table, and keeping the lights
on, to name a few. But whoever you
are, whatever you care about, climate
change poses a threat to it. The core
social motive framework can help
clarify how to talk about both adapta-
tion and mitigation in ways that make
this connection clear (see Hirsch and
Winter in this issue for examples of
how to implement this approach).
I must also caution that this strategy
has inherent danger. Threatening
U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 1st Class Jay C. Pugh
Sailors and other personnel pick up trash in Hawaii during a beach clean up in support of World Oceans Day.
34 | Solutions | January-February 2014 | www.thesolutionsjournal.org
Perspectives
someone’s sense of control, understand-
ing, and trust is an excellent way to
activate that person, but the behavior
that results is not always constructive.
Classically defined as a “fear appeal” in
social psychology, making the threat to
core needs apparent can easily trigger
self-defense, denial, and avoidance. This
is why it is essential that we…
3. Build our movements in ways
that maximize the extent to which
being involved in them meets core
social motives. Working towards a
sustainable world together not only
enhances our ability to meet core
biological and social needs in the
future, it also has the potential to
help us meet core social motives in
the present. This is how to combat
fear and despair. Working on sustain-
ability issues has greatly deepened
my understanding of the barriers to
change and what is truly needed to
succeed. It has expanded my circle
of relationships and enhanced my
sense of belonging to my community.
As I have built relationships and
deepened my understanding, my sense
of efficacy has increased. Perhaps of
greatest importance, these efforts have
created an unprecedented level of trust
between parties that in the past had
seen themselves as adversaries.
All this means that talking to
people, socializing with people,
coming back to the meeting table
even when people are frustrated, is
absolutely essential in building a
movement that not only maximizes
its capacity to find good solutions, but
leaves people stronger and happier as
they work towards those solutions.
4. Include the enhancement of core
social need fulfillment in all future
solutions. Finally, we need to make
sure that the new systems we put
into place are intentionally designed
to enhance humans’ ability to fulfill
core needs—not just biological needs
but also social needs. Technology that
reduces carbon emissions but deprives
people of autonomy and understand-
ing of how the world works will never
realize its potential. No matter how
ecologically sensitive, economic or
political systems that perpetuate
the grossly unequal distribution of
resources and power will continue
to undermine belonging and trust.
Solutions that leave people feeling
belittled and devalued will not endure.
If humans cannot meet their core
social needs in everyday life, we will
fail to create a sustainable world.
Luckily, we have every reason to
believe that sustainable communities
can meet our core biological and social
motives as well as or better than our
present system. Local economies build
economic resilience as well as control
and trust; biking and walking promote
health and community while reducing
carbon emissions. Sustainability is a
good product. Sacrifice of need fulfill-
ment is not required. If it were, all
would truly be lost.
Humans are capable of rapid
change and self sacrifice in preserva-
tion of their core needs. We need a
habitable planet, and we need each
other. We can do this.
References
1. Hardin, G. The tragedy of the commons. Science 162,
1243–1248 (1968).
2. Fiske, ST. Social Beings: Core Motives in Social
Psychology. (John Wiley & Sons, Hoboken, 2009).
3. Williams, KD & Nida, SA. Ostracism: Consequences
and Coping. Current Directions in Psychological Science
20, 71–75 (2011).
4. Fisher, R, Ury, W, & Patton, B. Getting to Yes:
Negotiating agreement without giving in, ed 2, 59
(Penguin Books, New York, 1991).
Giampaolo Macorig / Flickr
One of our core social motives is the need to belong, to be part of a social group.
