What are Motivations, Preferences and Choices, and Why Do Animals Have Them?
Motivation, the desire or willingness to engage in a behavior, can be positive or negative and vary in strength. Motivation is positive for tasks and outcomes that animals wish for and negative for undesirable activities. Positive and negative motivations are inferred from behavior, for example, from approach-behavior vs. avoidance, respectively (Kirkden & Pajor 2006).
Motivational strength varies between individuals. Some components of this variation can be ascribed to constant individual factors like species-specific characteristics or gender, while others are explained by changing individual or environmental factors like age, experience, time of day, weather, and resource predictability. In other words, a motivation is generally influenced by many factors that can be intrinsic (e.g., genetic or physiological) or extrinsic (i.e., in the animal’s environment). To illustrate, the motivation to drink (thirst) can be increased by hormones responsible for controlling the body’s water balance, but is also enhanced by the sight of water.
Preferences are based on an ability to evaluate sets of simultaneously available alternatives that satisfy the same motivation and to aspire toward the one opportunity that is most desirable. A preference may be specific to the individual (such as preferring potato chips over nuts), and refers to the difference in motivational strength to get the one resource over the other, or others. Ultimately, animal preferences are inferred from choice behavior. Choice behavior refers to what an animal actually does — the consequences of its preferences and its final decisions.
In summary, before animals make choices they go through a decision-making process guided by their motivations and preferences. Presumably, this strategy is adaptive, insofar as being advantageous to the animal and favored by evolution via natural selection: Individuals that choose beneficial options, like eating the more nutritious food or resting at the safer nesting site, are also more likely to have offspring that are successful in reproduction and survival (Real 1991).
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