Chapter 6 - Motivation and Resilience: Self-Help Myths and the Reality of Invisibility

Summary

The ideological nature of mainstream psychology becomes particularly clear in how motivation is interpreted and researched. The cauusal-reductionist model leads mainstream psychology to treat motivation as an intra-personal characteristic that causes individuals to succeed, or not, in a social system that is assumed to work as a meritocracy. From this perspective, the solution to poverty is for poor individuals to develop resilience. In this approach, mainstream psychology commits both the mereological and embryonic fallacies, ascribing the properties of wholes to parts, and assuming that from birth humans are self-contained individuals functioning independent of context. The issues of power and powerlessness should be central to the psychology of motivation, but they are almost completely absent from discussions. Poor people remain invisible and powerless, but the few individuals who do succeed to move up to become rich as used as tokens to justify the idea that 'this is a meritocracy that works.'