Motivation and Types of Motives (Instrumental, Identity, Ideological)

The social psychology of movement participation distinguishes three fundamental reasons why people participate in social movements: people may want to change their circumstances, they may want to act as members of their group, or they may want to express their views. Together these three motives account for most of the reasons why people take part in collective political action. Social movements may supply the opportunity to fulfill these motives and the better they do the more movement participation turns into a satisfying experience. In brief, the literature refers to these three motives as instrumentality, identity, and ideology. Instrumentality refers to movement participation as an attempt to influence the social and political environment; identity refers to movement participation as an expression of identification with a group; and ideology refers to movement participation as an expression of one's views. Different theories are associated with these three angles. Instrumentality is related to resource mobilization and political process theories of social movements and at the psychological level to rational choice theory and expectancy-value theories; identity is related to sociological approaches that emphasize the collective identity component of social movement participation and with the social psychological social identity theory; and ideology is related to approaches in social movement literature that focus on culture, meaning, narratives, moral reasoning, and emotion and in psychology to theories of social cognition and emotions.