Factors associated with opting care from closer location to residence among PLHIV at Andhra Pradesh, India between 2023 and 2024.

Athletes engage in exhausting practices, visual artists spend countless hours crafting, and academics read thousands of pages of published literature. Why? The term motivation has been used to describe a particular set of conditions that energize behavior. Deci and Ryan () described two types of motivation, intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, in a way that many in the psychological sciences and beyond still use today. Extrinsic motivation describes behavior that is energized to obtain or avoid a particular outcome (e.g., food). When an animal is hungry (i.e., a condition), it will exhibit more behavior directed toward obtaining food. Some athletes, artists, and academics complete their activities for money or other outcomes. However, in some situations, behavior is energized but not directed toward obtaining any apparent external outcome. Intrinsic motivation describes behavior that is energized by the opportunity to engage in the behavior itself. Athletes are said to play for the love of the game, artists are inspired by the opportunity to create, and intellectuals enjoy acquiring knowledge. These two types of motivation are often described as competing (i.e., negatively correlated) or mutually exclusive. There is no direct parallel in non-humans to painting with a paintbrush or flipping the pages of a book. However, these behaviors operate on the environment and, as operants, they represent extensions of naturally occurring behaviors. It is difficult to conceive of animal behavior, human or non-human, that is not on some level an extension of exploratory, foraging, sexual, or defensive behavior. The most frequently cited studies of seemingly intrinsically-motivated behaviors in non-human animals involve rhesus monkeys () interacting with mechanical locks or rodents running in wheels. Both behaviors could be interpreted as exploration or foraging (Garland et al. ; Hughes ; Novak et al. ; Sherwin ). Labeling a behavior as exploratory is only a problem when the standards for intrinsically-motivated behaviors are different in the human and non-human animal literatures. If a rat is motivated by exploration or foraging to start pressing a lever, then for some (e.g., a reviewer of this manuscript) it is an automatic disqualifier. Though we disagree, if it is accepted as the standard, then it should also apply to human behaviors (e.g., a child playing with blocks) initiated by curiosity (i.e., exploration). Rather than apply a forced dichotomy and ask whether other animals exhibit intrinsically-motivated behaviors or not, a more productive approach is to assess the conditions and properties of so-called intrinsically-motivated behavior and then test for them using non-human animals. Firstly, to approximate human studies, the behavior should not be an unconditioned response (e.g., salivation) to an obvious unconditioned stimulus (e.g., food), and it should persist at some rate in the absence of any delivery of an unconditioned stimulus. Secondly, the introduction of a response-contingent unconditioned stimulus, like food, may reduce the baseline rate of the response; alternatively, the reduction below baseline may occur only after food-contingent reinforcers are discontinued. One of the first studies to investigate intrinsic motivation was conducted with non-human animals. Harlow () gave rhesus monkeys a “puzzle” with six mechanical locks that could be manipulated in the absence of reinforcers. Across days, the monkeys were said to have engaged in the behavior for its own sake (i.e., intrinsic), which resulted in fewer errors in unlocking the puzzle locks. In one monkey, the rate of total interactions with the puzzle increased across 12 days (0.69 per min to 0.89), but the other monkey exhibited a decrease (0.80 per min to 0.66). The behavior occurred at a low rate in the absence of any food, but it did occur reliably above zero over sessions. When food was later introduced, the percentage of errors increased. This result indicated that food, most often used as a reinforcer (i.e., a stimulus that increases the behavior it follows) in the laboratory can, under some conditions, reduce behavior said to be energized by intrinsic motivation.