This week's topical blog will be devoted to your analysis of the movie Good Will Hunting.
This movie has concepts from Chapters 5-7.
Watch the movie. Take notes.
Next, write your comment. Your comment does not need to provide an overview of the movie (we have all seen it). Your comment should be an in-depth analysis of one or more principles from your text. You should use scenes and characters to provide examples of textbook concepts. Your comment should reflect that you are in an upper division, university level Motivation and Emotion course and clearly link elements from the movie to the textbook. This is a comprehensive assignment (linking course lectures, textbook, and the movie) and you cannot do that in just a few short paragraphs.
BE SPECIFIC. At the bottom of your comment, please put a list of the ME terms you used.
Good Will Hunting is a story about a young man who has extremely high ability and intelligence level, but due to the challenges in his life has wound up in a not so desirable lifestyle. The only people in his life are a small group of friends that Will gets himself into trouble with. Will has an overall lack of motivation or care for the things that go on in his life; however this is changed by the presents of a therapist (Sean McGuire) and a woman (Skylar) that is different from other women he’s met. Good Will Hunting is a movie about Will Hunting’s self-development after trials and challenges of adversity.
Very early in the movie we see that Will is highly intelligent; however, he does not express this intelligence in an academic way nor does he desire any recognition for that achievement. Because of this, it seems that Will has a low need for achievement. Will is an example of someone that has low need for achievement but is actually brilliant. He neither takes responsibility for his successes and failures nor does he care how well he does in comparison to other people. According to chapter seven, there are three conditions that must be met in order to have high need for achievement. Those are completing a difficult task (the mathematics he partakes in his highly difficult, but not to him), entrepreneurship, and competition. Will does not have a high need for achievement because he does not feel entrepreneurship and he has literally no competition. This is illustrated in the scene in which he is fighting with Professor Lambeau (a decorated math scholar) and expressing that it is easy for him in comparison to everyone else; therefore showing he has no competition. Once being forced into a situation where he must use his skills, Will only seems to have performance goals rather than mastery goals. He does not care about learning or developing his skill, but rather showing his ability in order to be done with it. These performance goals serve as a means to stay out of jail and nothing else.
The need for achievement also, in some ways, relates to the psychological need for competence. It is difficult to detect whether Will is moderate in need for competence because he clearly is extremely competent but does not seem to care or want the skill. He even tells Sean that he didn’t ask for his mathematical ability and doesn’t want it. However, I would guess that he does have an intrinsic need for competence because he finishes the proofs in the hallway at no reward. He likes being effective and using his skills however wants no recognition; once again this shows low need for achievement, a need for competence, and clear intrinsic motivation to use the skill, even when he could get extrinsic rewards for using it. However, it can also be argued that there was some extrinsic motivation in doing the math with the Professor because it kept him out of jail.
Will also has a low need for power. He has the ability to be extremely successful and hold leadership roles within the field but does not care about having prestigious materials or occupations. For much of the movie, Will does not seem to care for much of anything. This is demonstrated throughout the movie when he is rejecting all of Professor Lambeau’s encouragements and job opportunities. One scene in particular that illustrates this is when he sends his friend Chuckie to a job interview for him where he gets the interviewers to pay him money. One aspect of the need for power that Will does seem to have is aggressiveness. Will is aggressive both in the beginning with the fighting, and then again when he is meeting all of the therapists. Overall however, I would argue that Will’s need for power is low due to his lack of need for control.
Looking at Will’s need for affiliation and relatedness is very interesting. He has a group of friends but initially it does not seem to be of healthy relationships (low need for intimacy). This is shown in the scene between Sean and Professor Lambeau about the reasons why he is friends with the people he is. Professor Lambaeu does not understand why he spends time with them and Sean indicates that Will is friends with them because they are loyal and they would come to his defense at any time if needed. This scene is towards the end of the movie, and really gives the watcher an understanding of Will’s need for relatedness and intimacy. At the beginning it seems that Will has a need for affiliation because he is getting into fights which seem to be a way of seeking approval from his friends. However, at the end of the movie, we see more close relationships with these people showing that Will may have more of a need for intimacy than for affiliation like originally thought.
Along with the need for intimacy, Will meets a girl (Skylar) that really changes his way of thinking and behavior. Sean has a high need for intimacy which is shown in his depiction of the love he had for his late wife. Sean makes an attempt to get Will to understand these feelings. To this, Will mocks that he has an attachment disorder and fear of abandonment but is still unable to come to terms with his life and what happened. Part of me wonders if need for intimacy could be, in Sean’s case, a quasi-need; does the need for intimacy go away somewhat once it is received? Sean demonstrates a high level of this need because he has lost it.
In regard to Will’s need for intimacy, we see a drastic change from the beginning of the movie and the end. The scene where he is fighting with Skylar and she tells him that he won’t go to California because he is afraid she won’t love him back demonstrates an avoidance-oriented behavior style, in which he avoids all relationships. Clearly, this is a socialization influence that as occurred due to his troubled childhood. Developmental influence had an effect on Will also. Growing up in abusive foster homes has made Will avoidant of all relationships due to the fear of getting hurt. Cognitive influences also play a role in the way Will behaves. We see Will as rarely being optimistic and seems to have low expectations for himself. This is shown in the scene when he is telling Sean that he sees no problem (or lack of honor) in being a brick layer.
At the end, when Sean tells Will that what happened to him is not his fault, he finally he is able to let his feelings out and accept what has happened to him. This is a very powerful scene and it shows that Will had previously felt like he had no autonomy in his life. While he gave the illusion that he did, it is clear from this scene that his perceived autonomy is very low. It appears that throughout the movie Will is able to accept his need for intimacy which is shown when he chooses to go see Skylar rather than taking the job. This shows that, at this point, his need for intimacy is greater than his need for achievement. Will also seems to satisfy a need for relatedness, which is shown in his friendships. At the end, his friends are supportive of him and his potential for success. This is seen when his friend Chuck tells him how disappointed he would be if he doesn’t do anything with his life. While throughout the movie it seems like these interpersonal relationships are not healthy ones, it turns out that they are and they fulfill Will’s need for relatedness and affiliation. The last scene when Chuck goes to pick Will up and he isn’t there is a very moving scene because it illustrates the pride that Will’s friend has for him.
Good Will Hunting is effective in showing how people’s psychological and social needs can be met or not met depending on individual’s paradigm of the world and the behaviors they exude. It also shows how a person’s perceptions of needs can change their life and the things they pursue.
ME Terms: Need for achievement, need for affiliation, need for intimacy, need for power, competence, relatedness, autonomy, avoidance-orientated behavior, responsibility, conditions of task difficulty, competition and entrepreneurship, psychological need, social need, quasi-need, intrinsic motivation, extrinsic motivation, performance goal, mastery goal, effectiveness, leadership, aggressive, socialization influence, cognitive influence, developmental influence, and control.
Good Will Hunting is one of my favorite movies. I consider it to be a very good movie, and I feel one way that that is validated is that even though it is almost 15 years old our class is still doing a movie review on it. With that said, there are multiple ways to view the various aspects and elements that are presented during the movie. One important aspect or element of the movie is Will Hunting’s character. One way to view his character is through ‘entity theory’, or through the belief that some people are just smarter, more intelligent, and more motivated than others. Whereas if someone is an ‘incremental theorist’ then they would probably view Will’s character as someone who has had to work very hard throughout his life to become as intelligent as he has become.
Continuing on the idea of Will’s intelligence, there are a few different ways to view his achievement goals. Chapter seven defines achievement as “the desire to do well relative to a standard of excellence”. Will first demonstrates this by submitting the answer to Professor Lambeau’s challenging problem. Him doing so shows that he wanted to satisfy his need for achievement. Chapter seven explains that there are three conditions that involve and satisfy a person’s need for achievement, ‘moderately difficult tasks’, ‘competition’, and ‘entrepreneurship’. These conditions all help define high-need and low-need achievers. In my opinion Will is more of a low-need achiever because the math problem seemed easy to him and he was not outperformed by high-need achievers. Although looking at that scenario as a competitive one, Will willingly approached the problem and answered it, rather than avoiding it, which would fit more of the high-need achiever characteristic. However, supporting my belief in that Will is more of a low-need achiever, he never at any point during the movie sought to have an entrepreneurship job or role. He was always being led in his janitorial job, by Professor Lambeau with job interviews or by Robin William’s character, Sean McGuire with understanding his past and current parts of his life. I do believe he showed that he was both extrinsically and intrinsically motivated during different parts of the movie. He showed intrinsic motivation by solving Professor Lambeau’s challenge problem because no one asked or tried to motivate him to do so. And he demonstrated extrinsic motivation in when he decided to try to establish a relationship with Skylar, which came after Sean told him his story of how he gave up his ticket to Game 6 of the 1975 World Series to meet a stranger at a bar, who later became his wife.
One element that continues the focus both on Will’s character and on the need for achievement is another concept chapter seven explains, that there are two types of achievement goals. The two are ‘mastery goals’ and ‘performance goals’. I think the one that more fits Will’s character is mastery goals because it seemed clear to me that throughout the movie he sought to develop greater competence, to improve his self, and to overcome the various challenges that he was presented, with persistent effort.
Another element that chapter seven explains is ‘power’, which is similar to ‘autonomy’. Chapter seven describes that people high in the need for power desire to have: impact, control, and influence. Will demonstrates all of these during different points of the movie. He shows that he desires to have control when he basically rejects the first few psychologists that he is set-up with; that action demonstrated a quality of autonomy, ‘volition’. Volition is the concept of a person feeling pressured to engage in an activity and therefore not really feeling like they are in control of what happens to them. Will shows that he desires to make an impact and to have influence when he challenges Sean to take a look at his own life, in terms of dealing with the premature death of his life.
One more element that I feel applies to Will is ‘relatedness’, or “to establish close emotional bonds and attachments with other people”. I think Will was reluctant at times to use his gift for math ability because his friends and everyone else that he is close to did not have that gift, so I think he wanted to relate or fit in with them and seem ‘more normal’ or more ‘blue-collar’ like. Relatedness ties in with ‘Social Needs’, which Will demonstrates when he tries to push away Skylar after she asks him to go to California with her.
Terms: 1) entity theory 2) mastery goals 3) performance goals 4) achievement 5) social needs 6) power 7) competence 8) relatedness 9) volition 10) autonomy 11) external motivation 12) internal motivation 13) incremental theory 14) conditions that involve and satisfy the need for achievement
“Good Will Hunting” is about Will, a janitor at MIT, who is a math genius. He was a foster child and as an adult he finds himself in a lot of trouble with the law. A professor at MIT, Jerry, discovers that Will has a gift in math, and he gets him out of jail. Jerry says he will get Will out if Will agrees to go to therapy once a week and do math work. Will goes through several therapists before meeting Sean. Sean is the only therapist that stands up to Will, and he is able to achieve major progress with him. Throughout the movie, we see how Will interacts with his friends, especially his best friend, Chuckie, and his girlfriend, Skylar. We also see how Will reacts to being pushed into a prestigious job by Jerry and having someone like Sean, who only cares about what is best for Will.
I think the most interesting social need in this movie was intimacy. Will’s intimacy with his friends was high. They were very supportive of each other, and we saw this every time any of them got into a fight. It didn’t matter who started it or what the reason was, the other ones were always there backing them up. Will’s friend, Chuckie, wanted Will to have a better life, even if that meant never seeing him again. He cared about Will enough to put his needs above his own. However, Will’s intimacy with Skylar, Jerry, and his therapists was completely different. It was obvious at this time that Will had a difficult childhood, because he began to withdraw anytime people got close to him. Will ran away when Skylar said she loved him, and when Jerry said that he had high expectation for Will, he again panicked. Will ran off several therapists, because he didn’t want to take a chance of them getting close to him. Sean was able to turn this around for Will, and he made a big difference in Will’s ability to be intimate with people. Will really opened up to Sean, and at the end of the movie, Will heads to California to try to repair his relationship with Skylar. We also see in the movie that Will has a low need for affiliation. He doesn’t seem to try to impress anyone, and he doesn’t seek out friends to avoid loneliness.
Will’s view of achievement was also interesting in the movie. Jerry tried to set him up with jobs that most people would consider to be major achievements to get. However, Will was not at all interested in these jobs, and he even mocked the employers in the interviews. When Sean questioned Will about what he wanted to do with his life, he talked about the honor in doing laborious jobs such as being a brick layer or custodian. Sean kept prying, and Will was never able to actually say what he wanted to achieve in his life. I think Will showed that he wanted to achieve things greater than what he currently was by doing those math problems, but he does not need to achieve what others think he should to be a success. I believe Will had mastery goals, because he never really seemed to feel like he needed to prove his competence to others. I also think we see the Dynamics-of-Action model in Will’s life. Instigation causes him to approach the problems on the board, most likely because he was praised for doing well in math in the past. Inhibition caused him to want to avoid intimacy with people, because they tended to come with abuse in the past. Consummation was a large reason that Will did not want to enter a job where he would be doing the same math work every day. I think another issue for Will was that the tasks were never difficult enough to challenge him. The book says that moderately difficult tasks are best, because they challenge most people. However, Will is not challenged by these tasks nor is he challenged by difficult math problems. Math was boring and repetitive to him, because nothing was ever a big enough challenge.
Will’s need for power was shown in unhealthy ways throughout the movie. Will didn’t want to be in a position of power in work or school, but he showed his power on the streets and in the bars. Will beat up anyone who got in his way, and we hear about his many assault charges due to his aggression. Will was abused as a child, which is probably a large reason that he is so aggressive. However, I think he also wants to show his power over others, because he has not had a chance to do this much in his life. I think Will could be successful in a position of power as a career if he redirects his aggression towards this.
ME Terms: Intimacy, affiliation, achievement, mastery goals, competence, Dynamics-of-Action Model, instigation, inhibition, consummation, power, aggression
The movie we are to analyze this week is “Good Will Hunting.” The movie stars Matt Damon as Will Hunting, a custodian at MIT, that unknown to everyone around him has a genius IQ level. The movie follows the successes and short-comings of Will Hunting and his improbable path to reaching his true potential.
In the first scene Will discovers a problem written on a chalkboard in the hallway. This problem was designed to challenge the MIT students for an entire semester, but Will completed it in a very short period of time. He wasn’t asked to complete the problem, he wasn’t required to complete the problem, he just did it out of pure interest and enjoyment. A few scenes later a more difficult problem was posted and Will completed this problem with the same ease as before. Intrinsic motivation was behind Will attempting and completing these problems. His spontaneity and autonomy for learning has put him in a position to succeed that was unknown even to him. His organismic psychological need for autonomy might have also almost been his downfall. Will didn’t like the idea of institutional learning, paying for knowledge. He truly enjoyed learning what he wanted to learn and how he wanted to go about learning it. But in the end his competence for mathematics and learning in general was unmatched, and that is why Professor Lambeau wanted to challenge Will and put his brain to good use while working with him.
After agreeing to work on mathematics with Professor Lambeau, there is a scene in which they are doing problems together and they seemed to be bonding quite well. The social need of relatedness is being met by both Lambeau and Will in this particular scene. But the teacher assistant or graduate student helping Lambeau seemed to feel insecure or jealous. The reason in which I think as though he may feel this way is because even though he has spent much more time with Professor Lambeau, he hasn’t felt the personal connection or relatedness that Lambeau and Will felt in such a short period of time. I think that scene showed the differences in people’s need for relatedness and how it affects different people in different ways.
Throughout the sessions with the therapists Will refuses to open up, he seems to disconnect himself with the rest of society. This shows a lack of affiliation and intimacy with those around him. I believe it was session four with Sean Maguire (Robin Williams) where they first talked about anything relevant and it had to do with intimacy. Both Will and Sean begin talking about the women in their lives. Will’s talking about his new relationship with Skylar, and Sean with his deceased wife. Will begins the conversation with saying that he’s gotten laid, and that he recently went on a date. When Sean attempts to get Will to open up about it Will defects his questions and says he knows what he is doing. But Sean can see right through Will’s insecurities and brings up the topic of intimacy with Will. But instead of telling Will how he should live his life and become more intimate with Skylar, Sean talks about his relationship with his deceased wife and talks about how when you completely let your guard down and allow yourself to become intimate with someone, you reach a new level of needs satisfaction. This conversation, although brief, really sets the stage for Will and Skylar’s relationship for the rest of the movie. This conversation ultimately culminates at the end of the movie with Will driving across the country to see Skylar, thus proving Will has come full circle with his intimacy issues.
Terms: Intrinsic Motivation, Autonomy, Organismic Psychological Need, Competence, Social Need, Relatedness, Intimacy, Affiliation.
Early on in the movie, it’s evident that Will is a highly intelligent individual. Even though he’s fully aware of his intelligence, Will doesn’t seem to have a desire to prove his level of competence to other people. Instead of proving his competence to everyone else at MIT, it’s more like he’s proving it to himself that he can do it. He clearly has a low need for achievement because he doesn’t necessarily desire to do well relative to a standard of excellence (e.g., getting the math problem correct to appear in the school’s newspaper). This also kind of goes along with Will having mastery goals more so than performance goals. Instead, I think he’s intrinsically motivated to read lots of books, remember everything he can, as well as solve the math problems on the chalkboard for the simple sake of obtaining greater conceptual understanding in a broad sense. Another way his intrinsic motivation can been illustrated is by his persistence level of keeping at the math problems he comes across and always finishing them. The fact that he does not want to openly express his intelligence may go back to how he grew up. He lives in a low SES neighborhood and probably has all his life, he was abused growing up, went from foster home to foster home, got into trouble at school, etc. He didn’t grow up in an environment where a standard of excellence related to his high intelligence was expressed or appreciated.
Another textbook concept that relates to the movie is the concept of autonomy. Will has a high need for autonomy which can be seen throughout the entire movie. As a janitor, Will was somewhat able to make his own decisions about how he went about cleaning the school (e.g., what to do first, where to start). This is also evident in scenes where Will argues with other characters about how he doesn’t want to have a top-ranked job and sit behind a desk all day doing what he’s told to do. Instead, he’d much rather choose his own path and exercise his right to choose whether or not he even wants to pursue a better paying job in the first place. Related to job offers, Will’s low need for achievement is once again illustrated. Jerry set him up with interviews for jobs that most people could only dream of getting (huge accomplishment/achievement). Will wasn’t interested as I mentioned before.
Overall, I thought Will showed his low need for affiliation/intimacy/relatedness. He had one really close friend Chuckie. Other than that, it took a long time for Will develop any meaningful kind of relationship between his other friends, his girlfriend Skyler, Jerry, or his therapist. Will did develop a close relationship with Skyler at one point in the movie only to break up with her when she got too close to him. Later on of course he runs off to California to win her back which illustrates how he developed a higher need, as compared to the beginning of the movie, for affiliation/intimacy/relatedness.
M&E terms used: intrinsic motivation, persistence, conceptual understanding, achievement, mastery goals, performance goals, autonomy, competence, relatedness, intimacy, affiliation, psychological needs, motivated, standard of excellence
This movie demonstrates how Motivation is not innate that it in fact fluxuates across time due to many variables such as enviroment, and conflicting needs. It is fairly obvious that Will's group of friend's does not harbor great attitudes towards high intelligence, in fact it is quite the opposite. They value the typical blue collar lifestyle. Will of course wants to maitain the social need for releatedness, so he hides his intelligence from most people .
Then he solves the insanely hard problem at a prestigous university where he works ironically as the janitor which are sterotyped as being incompetent people. Will could have bragged about his talent, but instead does it more to demonstrate his comptency to himself and out of intrensic motivation.
This movie encompasses the whole battle between intrensic and extrensic motivation. All of the students who were given the same problem did not rise to the challenge, yet the janitor out of his own free will answered the problem out of enjoyment. Obviously someone who gets intrensic motivation out of things are going to go farther especially with academics.
Throughout the movie Will's social group changes and thus, his social needs are changed too. When he meets the highly intelligent girl at the bar it becomes clearer that he is going to realize it is not a bad thing to be smart. By the end of the movie his friends somewhat force him to leave because they know they would just bring him down .
Robin William's character posses a autonmy suppotive motivating style as opposed to the professor who has a controlling motivational style. It is again obvious that forcing someone to do something will not create motivation in the person. Even though Will continually pushes Robin William's buttons like a two year old, Robin Williams ultimately is succesful in creating change in Will. The Professor however ends up being schooled essentially by Will .
Some of Will's reluctance to demonstrate and pursue compentency stems from being abused as a child . When a child is abused physically/emotionally they don't develop that high need for achievement like most children would. It seems as though Will posses pride for all the wrong reasons and shame too.
His friends essentially take the place of family and his pride is based on fighting to protect their percieved feeling of pride and he is ashamed of his intelligence because he hides it, but by the end of the movie it has actually flip flopped.
tERMS USED: intrensic Motivation, Extrensic motivation, autonmy, shame, pride, releatedness, social needs, motivation, competence, autonmy suppotive motivation, controlling auntomy motivation,
This movie involved many psychological and social needs. I’ll first discuss psychological needs. There are three main psychological needs: autonomy, competence, and relatedness. Each of these needs is considered a growth need because we gain something by satisfying these needs. It’s important to understand the Person-Environment dialectic, which is the theory that the person is affected by the environment and the environment is affected by the person. This dialectic is a continuous, changing cycle. In Will’s life, his environment plays a huge role as to why he is the person he is. The need for autonomy can help explain this.
The need for autonomy is the desire to have control over your own decisions and behavior. Throughout Will’s life, he had problems with autonomy. During the movie, his need for autonomy was very much satisfied because he had complete control over what he wanted to do. Besides the fact that he was required to go to the therapy sessions, he had high volition. He could chose what he wanted to talk about, what kind of job he’d have, and what types of relationships he’d have in his life. That wasn’t always the case, however. When he was a child, he was physically abused by his father, which left him little room to feel autonomous. Due to Will’s high need for autonomy, he still did what he could to have some sort of perceived choice over his actions. Will would choose which item his father would abuse him with. Although the movie didn’t mention this, I’m sure Will chose to leave home as soon as he could, another example of his self-determination. Another example of autonomy is shown by Shawn. I feel that Shawn’s need for autonomy was not being met because he was being controlled by the grief from his wife dying. It seemed that until he met Will, he had low volition and although he still enjoyed being a teacher, he didn’t do other things he wanted because the memory of his wife kept him in a routine. After the therapy sessions with Will, Shawn decided to meet his need for autonomy by traveling and doing things he really wanted to. He finally had control over his choices again. Shawn also made sure to be autonomy-supportive with Will so that Will could succeed and have the benefit of psychological well-being.
Competence is another psychological need that had varying levels in this movie. Will’s need for competence is very high because he’s so intelligent. The problem in this movie was that this need was not being met. Will had a poor background so he couldn’t afford to go to school but he found ways to try and meet this need. He read many books to gain knowledge and satisfy this need and although this helped, he wasn’t challenged enough. When Will was discovered by Jerry, Jerry offered many opportunities for Will to meet this need but Will had other issues. Sometimes, the offers were still not challenging enough for him. When Will worked as a janitor at a technical school, he would sneak into classrooms to finish equations that people were working on. Doing this like this helped to satisfy his need for competence but it didn’t last. Throughout the movie, Will never reach the experience of flow, which is a state of total involvement in an activity that consists of the right amount of skills and challenge. Although Will was high in skills and abilities, he was never challenged high enough. I think that if Will would have experienced flow by being optimally challenged, his need for competence would’ve been met and he would’ve been a happier person and most likely not had legal troubles.
The third psychological need is relatedness. Relatedness is the desire to have relationships that are honest and caring and that show value. This need is similar to autonomy for Will because during the movie, the need was met often but during his childhood, the need was most likely never met due to the abuse of his father. Will had a close group of friends that were always there to support him. These friends were involved in a communal relationship, which is the relationship between people who care about each other. The opposite of a communal relationship is an exchange relationship which is between people who have no obligation to care about each other. Will has more exchange relationships than communal because it’s hard for him to trust others due to his background. Examples of people Will has exchange relationships with are Jerry, the therapists, and his employer. At the beginning of the movie, Will has an exchange relationship with Shawn because he’s just another therapist trying to pick his brain. During the movie, Will and Shawn become close and their relationship turns communal. Will also has a communal relationship with Skylar because he cares very much about her, even though he’s not sure how to deal with it.
The concept of engagement refers to the “behavioral intensity, emotional quality, and personal investment in another person’s involvement during an activity” (11). This concept is important because it helps to understand the underlying motivation for why someone does something. In this movie, Will isn’t behaviorally engaged until the end of the movie because he doesn’t put much effort towards finding a career that could utilize his abilities and satisfy his need for competency. Will is emotionally engaged when he is satisfying his need for autonomy because he enjoys volition and also when he’s being supported by Shawn and his friends. He’s cognitively engaged when he’s figuring out math problems for Jerry or being challenged at something else.
The other types of needs that are involved in this movie are social needs. Although social needs are learned through experienced, they’re very important to our well-being. The four social needs are achievement, affiliation, intimacy, and power. “The need for achievement is the desire to do well relative to a standard of excellence” (175). Although Will is very smart and could accomplish many things, I think his need for achievement is somewhat low. He wasn’t raised to expect success or value achievement so he doesn’t have a high need. The book describes people with a low need for achievement tend to respond with anxiety and defense. I think Will responded defensively throughout most of the movie. He didn’t want to go to any job interviews or help Jerry figure out problems. Will would satisfy his need for achievement by completing difficult tasks.
The second and third social need of affiliation and intimacy can be discussed together because they are similar. Affiliation is the desire to interact with others to avoid fear, disapproval, and loneliness. People with a high need for affiliation are very anxious about being rejected by others and make a lot of friendships to avoid being lonely. It’s considered a deficiency-oriented motive because meeting this need decreases negative emotions. Will has low affiliation needs because he doesn’t need the approval of others to be okay. He most likely learned this as a child because he didn’t have the approval of his father and he was fine. Skylar, however, had a higher need for affiliation. This only seemed present when her and Will were arguing and Skylar kept saying I love you, in hopes that Will would return the saying. I think that although Shawn doesn’t have a high need for affiliation, that his needs weren’t being met because he was very lonely. It seems that after Shawn and Will became good friends, that this need was finally met.
The similar need to affiliation is intimacy. The need for intimacy is the desire to have warm, loving relationships. Will had a medium level of need for intimacy. It wasn’t low because he still needed close relationships but it wasn’t high because he was guarded because of his past. Some examples of Will meeting his need for intimacy was going on a date with Skylar, the growth of their relationship, and when Will drives to California to see her. I believe that Will also met this need by the growth of his friendship with Shawn. Will knew that Shawn was there for his well-being and that he could trust him and communicate with him.
The last social need is power. Power is the desire to have control over another person or thing. People high in the need for power look for ways to become leaders and impact other peoples’ lives. I think the main example from the movie for this need is Jerry. Jerry was high in the need for power and this was evident because he was constantly trying to take control over the outcome of Will’s future. He was also trying to control how Shawn was dealing with Will. Jerry was rather aggressive and this is one way that people high in the need for power get what they want. Jerry believed that his way was the best and didn’t want to take any one else’s advice.
This movie displayed many ways in which the psychological and social needs manifest themselves.
Terms: psychological needs, social needs, autonomy, competence, relatedness, growth need, Person-Environment Dialectic, volition, perceived choice, self-determination, autonomy-supportive, flow, optimally challenged, communal relationship, exchange relationship, engagement, behaviorally/emotionally/cognitively engaged, achievement, standard of excellence, affiliation, intimacy, power, deficiency-oriented motive, impact, control, aggressive
Good Will Hunting tells the story of Will Hunting, a particularly bright young man that has taken a path in life path that is less than rewarding. The movie provides prime examples of a man meeting his own intrinsic desires. While his behavior and attitudes may be frowned upon by most, his actions reflect his psychological and social needs. The majority of the viewers of this movie who examine Will’s actions may not understand his motives for his actions. After half a semester of Motivation and Emotion however, I feel as though I can understand his character from a scientific standpoint. I will point out select scenes and themes from the film that demonstrates topics from the class.
The movie starts out highlighting Will’s current life; a janitor at MIT. Will does not attend the university, but constantly observes the academia that surrounds him. Gerald Lambeau, a world renowned mathematics professor lectures in the same building in which Will works. Gerald presents his class with a challenge: to solve a near impossible equation that few people ever have completed. He offers a reward to the first person that can correctly solve the equation. Will overhears this and even though he is not a student at the school and ineligible for the reward, works at solving the problem. It is likely that Will was acting out of intrinsic motivation. Intrinsic motivation is defined as the inherent desire to engage one’s interest and exercise and develop one’s capacity. There was no reward at stake for Will. The other students were likely trying to solve the problem out of extrinsic motivation, an environmentally created reason to engage in an action or activity. Professor Lambeau offered his students an incentive, or a reason to engage in the behavior. Incentives can make an uninteresting task [solving an equation] more interesting. One may ask, if there is no incentive for Will, why does he want to solve the problem so bad? Research has shown that there are benefits of intrinsic motivation. Those who act out of their own interests display more persistence in their engagement of the behavior. We see Will writing out the equation on a mirror in an attempt to solve it, a prime example of persistence. Intrinsic motivation also leads to a greater conceptual understanding, or a higher quality of learning.
When Gerald Lambeau discovers that the equation had been solved, he is in utter disbelief with who finally solved it. When he confronts Will about it, he reacts with negative emotion, and rebellion. Gerald attempts to reward Will by giving him opportunities to advance at the school. This proved to be a mistake. Gerald rewarded Will’s intrinsically motivated behavior with attention and praise. This can make an intrinsically motivated behavior less motivating. Suddenly, Will’s display of genius is no longer coming from inherent desires, but rather environmental [Lambeau’s attention] factors.
To further examine Will’s intrinsic motivation, we must look at which psychological needs he was meeting. There are three types of psychological needs: autonomy, competence, and relatedness. While he expresses these needs at different parts of the film, we can find examples of all of them throughout. After Will is arrested, he is given probation under the circumstances that he works with Professor Lambeau and meets with a counselor, Sean Maguire, twice a week. We see his strong need for autonomy when he is forced to live out the judge’s orders. Autonomy is the psychological need to experience self-direction and personal endorsement. Prior to his arrest, Will engaged in his own lifestyle in which few people were telling him what to do or how to think. While he eventually realized the benefit of his counselor, he was in a very unstable condition until then. His autonomy was robbed from him and until he felt in control of his life again, he displayed negative emotions. We see another example of autonomy when his girlfriend, Skylar, asks him to move to California with her. Once again, he feels as though he is not in complete control of his life and lashes out at her in his defense.
Will also displays a need for competence, the psychological need to be effective when interacting with the environment. Though he does not display competence with his school or work, he does so by never backing down in an argument. We see this when he is at the bar and has an argument with the Harvard student who was trying to boast his intelligence and again when he solves a difficult equation in front of a frustrated mathematician. Though he was not interested in feedback, he was clearly up for the challenge when embarking on these challenges. His behavior also demonstrates the social need for achievement. Will was acting on mastery goals, rather than performance goals. Mastery goals are set to develop one’s own competence, rather than to outperform others which he clearly did not care about.
For the majority of the movie, Will seems to lack his need for relatedness, which is defined as the psychological need to establish close emotional bonds and attachments with other people. Aside from his three best buddies, Will makes almost no attempt to form relationships with his new peers. We see this when he refuses to talk to his counselor, or take the advice of Professor Lambeau seriously. This begins to change however, when he meets Skylar. He feels very strongly about this woman and despite their argument about the move to California, we can sense a desire to adhere to their strong bond. This change also demonstrates a social need, intimacy. Intimacy is the desire to establish warm and secure relationships. This becomes apparent when he finally has a heart to heart conversation with Sean. Until this point, it seemed as though he had a relatively low need for intimacy. The movie ends with Sean reading a note from Will saying “If the professor calls about that job, just tell him sorry. I had to go see about a girl”. This warmed my heart as I was able to observe his rising need for intimacy.
The dynamic story of Will Hunting is a prime example of someone meeting their psychological and social needs. This was the first time I had seen Good Will Hunting, and I thoroughly enjoyed. The concepts we’ve learned in class became quite clear to me very early on and it was fun to observe his story from a motivational approach.
Terms: intrinsic motivation, extrinsic motivation, incentive, engagement, conceptual understanding, psychological needs, autonomy, competence, feedback, relatedness, social needs, intimacy, achievement, mastery goals, performance goals.
So I am glad I saw good will hunting. Not a movie I have seen before, but there is a lot of material present in the movie that can be related back to motivation and emotion. Will must have a strong sense of intrinsic motivation. A person of his background has no pressure from parents, teachers, or anyone to learn. He reads books and learns on his own without the prompts of anyone else. From this, he is able to achieve the psychological needs of feel autonomy, competence, and relatedness. He has autonomy because he decides what he wants to learn on his own time with a school’s influence. He most definitely possesses a significant amount of competence knowing that he can accomplish math problems in a short time that would take other people weeks to work on. It also serves his need for relatedness. His friends rely on his smarts to help them get out of trouble and picking up ladies. In fact, he probably would not of been able to catch the interest of his girlfriend if he did not outsmart the guy with bad hair.
Will is also externally motivated in the film as well. He is kept out of jail by the external motivation of a teacher. All he has to do is attend class and see a therapist. His incentive is to partake in these in these activities to be a free man. The consequence of not attending is jail time. He ended up almost going to jail because of a fight. While in this fight, he must have had a bunch of hormones and neurotransmitters going about in his system. Endorphins to block the pain from the punches so that he could continue to punch the other guy. Dopamine probably entered his body after he realized he won the fight (lost soon afterward being arrested).
Will also is able to achieve his physiological needs as well. We works as a janitor so that he can afford to hang out with his friends and buy dirk and food to quench his thirst and hunger. The need for sex is also met when he meets his girlfriend. Or when he referenced that he got laid a couple of times in the past to the therapist. Sadly, will also has an avoidance-orientated behavior at the beginning of the film. He doesn’t let anyone get truly close to him and he can’t say ‘I love you” back to his girlfriend.
The movie also shows examples that will is accomplishing his social needs despite his avoidance tendencies. He has proven that he has achievements because of the solved math problems and his massive intellect. He also strives for affiliation with his friends and his therapist (later on). He helps his friends and tries to impress them. He also becomes good friends with Robin Williams’s character and exchanges numbers to stay in touch even though he doesn’t have to. He also seeks intimacy from the therapist and his girlfriend later on in the film. He is ready to trust people and get close to them so that he can be truly understood. Will also shows that he has power. He verbally dominated the guy in the bar and physically dominated the other guy in the court. Therefore, he ensured his dominance over the two guys. This aggression may make will be motivated for leadership.
TERMS USED=Extrinsic motivation, intrinsic motivation, autonomy, competence, relatedness, incentive, consequence, neurotransmitters, dopamine, endorphins, physiological needs, thirst, hunger, sex, avoidance-orientated behavior, social needs, psychological needs, aggression, leadership motive pattern, power, achievement, affilation, intimacy.
Will Hunting is a janitor at MIT, has never attended college, but is extremely smart. He has read many intellectual books, is able to comprehend them, and can retain every piece of information long term. He knows he is gifted, but for many parts of the movie, he is extrinsically regulated using his gifted brain. In scene 4 of the movie, Will is in a Harvard bar and proceeds to get into an intellectual brawl with a male who has insulted his friend. He is extrinsically motivated to do this to gain approval from his peers and for the opportunity to belittle someone who was a jerk. In scene 6, he is motivated to insult and infuriate several therapists, not just for the challenge of it (intrinsic motivation), but to prove a point that he does not need therapy and for the reward of seeing their reactions (therefore, extrinsically motivating).
He has been in trouble with the law many times, which you would think would serve as a punisher consequence to decrease his illegal behaviors. However, Will uses his gift in court to avoid punishment for all of the offenses against him. Since his arrests have never actually landed him in jail, his illegal actions actually serve as an incentive to Will. When he sees an opportunity, let’s say for a fight, I think he has an incentive to proceed with it because if he is caught, he will have the chance to use his skills on another intellectual person to try and outsmart them.
He chooses this lifestyle to serve his psychological need of relatedness. Sean, who is the therapist Will gets close with, summarizes it best in scene 16: “Will has a built in defense mechanism caused by being abandoned by those who were supposed to love him most, so he chooses friends who are loyal to him and he pushes people away before they can hurt him”. I think when he engages in these activities, it is his misguided way of relating to others and forming social bonds beyond his circle of friends. In normal social bonds, the relationship is supposed to be caring and reciprocal to satisfy that need. Instead, Will uses his intellect in social situations to maybe make himself happy (for the moment), but he does so at the expense of the other person, not truly satisfying the relatedness need and forming true bonds.
ME terms: extrinsic regulation, extrinsic motivation, intrinsic motivation, punisher, consequence, incentive, psychological need, relatedness, defense mechanism, social bond.
The movie Goodwill Hunting portrayed tons of themes from the book especially chapters 5 through 7. There are numerous examples of intrinsic motivation, extrinsic motivation, psychological needs, and social needs. Each character in the movie portray various instances of all of these and others. The main character, Will, as played by Matt Damon gives some of the prime examples from book concepts. Will has high needs for autonomy, competence, and power. Will portrays very little need for intimacy and achievement.
The first example in the movie that intrigued me and I thought showed a few concepts from the book was the relationships and group dynamic of the four young boys: morgan, will, Chuckie sullivan (ben affleck), and other character. There group seems to fulfill there need for relatedness. There is interaction between the four and obvious social bonds. There a number of examples in the movie that they care about each other's welfare such as when Will stands up for Ben afflecks character at the bar, and when Will picks a fight the other three are assumed to go along and have his back. There friendship also fulfills their need for affiliation. For example, they buy Will a car for his birthday. The four boys have a communal relationship. Will and Chuckie have the most intimate relationship.
The main character, Will, portrays all of the different social and psychological needs. Will tranisitions through intrinisc and extrinisic motivation as well. In the beginning Will has low behavioral engagement with the professors but towards the end he becomes engaged. Will is also highly congnitvely engaged in many scences throughout the movie. It becomes very apparent early in the movie Will has both high need for competence and high need for autonomy. Will first depicts his competence by solving the problem in the hallway. It shows that he effective in exercising the specific skills and capacities to solve the problems. He also shows his competence when he confronts the grad student at the bar. He reads the therapists books and he enjoys showing others his competence. Even though Will is much above others competence he lacks the need for achievement to do anything with it. He is brilliant, but only works as a janitor. He is bright enough to hold lots of jobs but because of his low need for achievement he is happy being just a janitor until finally the breakthrough with Sean Maguire telling him "its not his fault". Will is also very autonomous. When Will is given probation and Jerry (the MIT professor) tells him he will have to see a therapist twice week Will is extremely unhappy. Will gets very upset being made to do things, especially what he doesn't want to do. He really struggles when his autonomy is taken. When the professors try to help but accidently take away some of his autonomy he has a defense mechanism to work against them and fight their efforts. Will also shows various types of motivations. At the beginning when Will first solves the problem annonmously he appears to be intrinsically motivated. There is no obvious external reward, he enjoys the feelings of being competent. But once Will goes to jail and the professor helps him get probation Will transitions his motivation to extriniscally or more precisely: externally regulated. As we spoke in class intrinsic motivation is often better and this is apparent in the movie. Will is extriniscally motivated to see the therapists becuase of Jerry (the professor) and not for his own mental health or well-being. Since his only motivation derives extrinisically to see the therapists he messes around and jokes with 5 of them. This is also true when the professor sets up interviews and Will has his friend go to it instead. Throughout the movie both professors try to push Will so that he "can do something with his life". Their efforts do not work because they don't appeal to what would make Will intrinsically motivated to use his true capacities. I also feel that Will has a need for power. In his interactions with other people he enjoys impacting, controling, and influencing them. Which corresponds to some of the examples in the book such as preferring to hang out in small groups versus a dyad, low need for intimacy, and poor relationships when it comes to dating/marriage. An example of his low need for intimacy is when Will is unable to tell his girlfriend he loves her. I believe this would make alot of sense with Will's character: Social needs such as need for intimacy are not innate needs but rather from social needs. The character Will grew up in different foster homes and had been abused too. This seems to portray the idea that Will's upbringing and socialization did not favor having intimate relationships, which also might explain for his very high need for autonomy.
There are also other characters in the movie that experience different types of motivation, including the two professors: Jerry and Sean Maguire (Robin Williams). Jerry at first appears to be intrinsically motivated to help Will but later in the movie when he is out for dinner he speaks about the guy who created "continued fractions" and other math theories. At this point you can realize that Jerry is extrinsically motivated to help Will. He wants Will for his student and to create new theories etc. Jerry has very high need for achievement. Sean Maguire seems to be more intrinsically motivated to help Will. It might be his need for achievement or his need for competence to try better understand Will or help him.
Intrinsic motivation, extrinsic motivation, psychological needs, autonomy, competence, relatedness, social needs, achievement, affiliation, intimacy, power, interaction, social bonds, socialization, defense mechanism, communal relationship, behavioral engagement, cognitive engagement
The movie Good Will Hunting is a story about a young man named Will Hunting played by Matt Damon. Will Hunting is a very bright yet troubled character who is evidently suffering from a lack of his relatedness, and intimacy needs being met. The fact that he was severely punished as a child growing up instead of properly regulated by positive reinforcements are the cause for his lack of willingness to fulfill these needs. Although these needs are not being met, his needs for autonomy and competency are being met very highly. Also, it is apparent that his need for power and achievement are very low compared to the other psychological and social needs.
In the beginning of the movie, Will Hunting solves several impossibly complex mathematics formulas left on a blackboard outside of a classroom at MIT. He is soon found by the MIT mathematics’ professor, Prof. Gerald Lambeau, and through a series of events inserted into court ordered counseling. The counseling takes place throughout the movie as Will Hunting’s glaring psychological needs are brought more into light. The first psychological need that Will struggles with is relatedness. Relatedness is defined as the psychological need to establish close emotional bonds and attachments with other people, and it reflects the desire to be emotionally connected to and interpersonally involved in warm relationships. Although it isn’t immediately apparent, Will has a high need for relatedness that is restricted because of the abuse he took as a child. Some would argue that Wills need for relatedness is being fulfilled by his close friend Chuck. This is a valid argument because he does have a close friend that does fulfill part of the need. His need isn’t fulfilled for the most part of the movie because he doesn’t have many communal relationships. Communal relationships are defined as relationships between persons who care about the welfare of the other, such as friends, family, and romantic relationships. Will’s friendship with Chuck fits into this category but to have his relatedness need fulfilled Will would need a romantic relationship or a close family member. This is where the character Skylar comes in. Skylar has the capability to not only fulfill Will’s need for relatedness but also his need for intimacy. Intimacy is defined as a willingness to experience a warm, close, and communicative exchange with a person. For the entirety of the movie, Will keeps Skylar at a distance even though they obviously care a lot about each other. Skylar continually gets emotionally closer to Will and eventually causes him to push her away. This is most likely due to the lack of relatedness that he has felt throughout most of his life and fear of establishing an intimate relationship with someone who can hurt him. At the end of the movie, Will decides to go to California after Skylar because of his counselor, Sean Maguire, opening him up to satisfy his needs for relatedness and intimacy.
Throughout the movie, Will Hunting’s childhood abuse that he took in foster homes is occasionally discussed. Punishers were used in the homes that he grew up in to regulate his behavior. Punishers are defined any environmental stimulus that, when presented, decreases the future probability of the undesired behavior. The punishments Will received growing up were meant to decrease the delinquency he got himself but mainly caused negative side effects on his psychological need for relatedness and his social need for intimacy. A more effective approach that the foster parents could have taken to raise Will would have been positive reinforcement. Positive reinforcement is defined as any environmental stimulus that, when presented, increases future probability of the desired behavior. Some routes that the foster family could have taken to increase the probability of Will’s better behaviors would have been to show their approval by giving him special privileges or recognition. Another possibility is that they could have given him rewards for his good behavior. Rewards are defined as an extrinsic offering from one person given to another in exchange for his or her service or achievement. If Will’s foster parents would have offered him money or a fancy new gaming system instead of physically abusing him it would have had a much more positive and higher impact on his behavior and making his need for intimacy and relatedness to be lower in the future. The negative impact from the abuse he received is made evident by the scene with Sean McGuire when they discuss the abuse and Will breaks down into tears in Sean’s arms.
One thing that really stands out in the movie is Will Hunting’s genius and quick wittedness. Will shows an excellence in competence throughout the entire movie. Competency is defined as the psychological need to be effective in interactions with the environment, and it reflects the desire to exercise one’s capacities and skills and, in doing so, to seek out and master optimal challenges. Not only does he show effectiveness in every task that he takes part in, he out does the best at them. Another need that is being completely if not over satisfied is autonomy. Autonomy is defined as the psychological need to experience self-direction and personal endorsement in the initiation and regulation of one’s behavior. Through the movie, Will does whatever he wants, wherever he wants, whenever he wants to. When he is forced to go into interviews he doesn’t want to have any part of, his lack of autonomy is met with disrespect and a complicated refusal of the interviewees offers. An example of this would be when he has an interview with the NSA. He shows complete disrespect towards the NSA official and the organization itself when he could have respectfully declined the job offer. Both the need for autonomy and competency seem to have high value to Will but because they are being met sufficiently through most of the movie it is hard to scale them any differently.
However, the social needs for power and achievement appear to be of very low need to the character Will. Achievement is defined as the desire to do well relative to a standard of excellence. In the movie, Will easily crushes anyone who would question his intelligence and has no desire to become a winning mathematician. It is very evident throughout the movie that achieving any awards or a high paying job are not important to him therefore reinforcing that he has a very low need for achievement. Power is defined as a desire to make the physical and social world conform to one’s personal image or plan for it. Will never shows a need for power and his behaviors do not reflect a lack of the need for powers fulfillment.
ME Terms - relatedness, intimacy, punisher, positive reinforcer, autonomy, competency, power, achievement, psychological needs, social needs, behavior, environment
There was quite a bit of information in this movie that can be related to chapters 5-7 from the book so I will discuss the connections by chapter. A good place to start the discussion of this movie is with the intrinsic motivations of certain characters. Will is quite has high intrinsic motivation to both learn and do math. He spends a lot of time reading and mastering certain subject matters and even got a job as a janitor at MIT so that he could work on the most challenging math problems. It is clear that he is intrinsically motivated to do this because he works on the problems secretively and even runs away when someone sees him working on it. Professor Lambeau is also very intrinsically motivated because he has spent his life’s work on mathematics and is enthused to have someone like Will to work with on new challenges in math theorem.
It can also be argued that Prof. Lambeau is extrinsically motivated to work on his mathematic theory because he quite often mentions the Field Medal that he won for work. The Field Medal is a reward that Prof. Lambeau earned and has positively reinforced his work in the field. I think that Will can also be viewed as an incentive for Prof. Lambeau because seeing Will’s ability causes Lambeau to become excited about doing his work. An interesting form of consequence that I picked up on was with regard to Will’s therapist Sean. He tells Will that he used to provoke his father to beat him so that his mother and little brother were spared from the abuse. This would be a peculiar example of positive reinforcement, because when that environmental stimulus (him getting hit and not his mom/brother) is presented it increases the probability that he will behave the same way in the future.
Although the abuse of Will as a child described in the movie is quite different from the corporal punishment (spanking) that is discussed in Ch. 5, the unintended consequences are still similar. He clearly displays tremendous amounts of aggression, symptoms of alcoholism and a state criminal record that the judge read through. The idea that expected and tangible rewards will decrease intrinsic motivation is also clearly seen throughout the movie. As everyone starts to discover how brilliant Will is they start to talk about all the money and rewards he could acquire, but this also starts to make Will less interested in doing what he loves for the pure fun of it.
There are a lot of psychological needs that are presented in this movie starting with autonomy. Will clearly needs/wants a lot of autonomy, he wants to decide what to do, when to do it, how to do it, when to stop doing it, and whether or not to do it at all. Some of this autonomy is restricted by that fact that he is in trouble with the law. He chooses to work with Prof. Lambeau and go to therapy with Sean as opposed to going to jail where his autonomy would be almost non-existent. Sean is a perfect example of an autonomy –supportive person who listens carefully, allows Will to talk (e.g. Sean waited a whole hour for Will to talk), provides rationale for what he is trying to achieve with him, asks him what Will wants to do (e.g. “Your move, chief”) and acknowledges Will’s perspective. We clearly see that Sean’s autonomy-supportive style is helping to improve Will’s psychological well-being by the end of the movie, he is less angry and leaving his comfort zone to be with Skylar. Lambeau on the other hand has a very controlling style who speaks directives, uses a lot of should, must and have to statements, and seems very demanding (e.g. trying to control his future career path with job interviews).
Will has such a high level of competence that it is almost impossible for him to find a state of flow where he is challenged academically. This is shown in the scene where Lambeau is trying to suggest ways for Will to redo his work and Will keeps telling him it’s right. Will then bursts out in frustration that he is sick of explaining his work to people that don’t understand it. We also get a sense of his ability when he starts to burn the paper and Lambeau desperately tries to save the work. Although Will can’t be easily challenged in the academic arena he has a much lower competence level in personal relationships which is where Sean is trying to challenge him.
Will has a very difficult time with his psychological need for relatedness. In one aspect he does have a very close and supportive group of friends, with emotional bonds that are seen throughout the movie (i.e. Chuckie, Morgan, Billy). Creating these social bonds, on the other hand, are very difficult for Will. This is evident with how much of a struggle it is to let both Sean and Skylar into the emotional and vulnerable aspects of his life, but he is capable of making these connections.
One aspect of social needs that prominent in this movie is the need for achievement. I would classify Will as having a low need for achievement due to the fact that he really doesn’t have the desire to do well relative to a standard of excellence, he does all of the math for its intrinsic qualities. Some of this makes sense when you think about the fact that he didn’t have any proper socialization influences that produce the need to achieve. He lived in multiple foster homes, hasn’t traveled outside of Boston and has likely never had a stable form of influences. I found it interesting that Skylar told Will that he was scared of failing, which fits into Atkinson’s Model of the tendency to avoid failure, and this is why he doesn’t approach anything new. Will’s achievement goals actually fit into both mastery and performance categories depending on which skill you are looking at. He has a performance type goal in academia because he displays high ability, success with little effort and outperforms others. His relationship skills are more of a mastery type goal because he is still trying to develop, progress, and improve his skills and overcome difficulties.
Sean had a very high level of intimacy with his wife which is apparent when he tells Will that she used to fart in her sleep and that he loved her imperfections. Will has a very difficult time with intimacy due to his past. It is clear that it’s hard for him to let Skylar get close to him and he constantly lies to her about having 12 brothers.
ME Terms: Consequence, incentive, positively reinforced, extrinsically motivated, intrinsically, corporal punishment, expected and tangible rewards, psychological needs, autonomy, autonomy –supportive, psychological well-being , controlling, relatedness, competence, flow, achievement, socialization influences, Atkinson’s Model of the tendency to avoid failure, achievement goals, mastery, performance, intimacy
Will has a dirty little secret, he’s smart! One of the first scenes in the movie a math professor writes an extremely difficult math problem on the chalk board. This problem only takes Will minutes to complete.Upon seeing the correct answer on the board there is a press conference in the professors room, Will never shows up to claim his prize or get a reward. Then again, another problem and another answer, this time Professor Lambeau sees Will writing out the problem, but when confronted, Will runs away. It’s obvious that these problems are of no competition to Will, so the question is why would he run away? I mean, doing these math problems seems to be his intrinsic motivation. It’s his interest to be doing the math problems and to most people it’s a challenge. Maybe its incentives that keeps him away. Will is always getting in trouble and got his janitor job through is probation officer. It seems that he doesn’t have the competence in accepting that he has a real talent and can do something great with his life. Or it could be the consequence that leaves him to run. It could also be extrinsic motivation. To avoid unnecessary conflict he runs away from is performance.
Finally, Professor Lambeau gets to Will, he talks to him about working with him and going to therapy to get out of his jail time. Will agrees, even though he’s not so thrilled about the therapy. Lambeau takes Will under his wing, and once this happened I could see that Lambeau’s assent wasn’t too happy, poor Tom. In a way, this help out with Wills social needs. He gets affiliation from the professor and his friends, he has the power to over through some of the smartest people in the math world and even some of the therapist.
Three therapist later, Lambeau calls in his old college roomie, Sean Maguire. After a while Lambeau and Maguire have a falling out over Wills future. Lambeau says Will can have great achievements in his future. That he can become a great mathematician and have the power over others. But is this best for Will? Instead of going to an interview, he sends Chuck, who did a fine interview I must say! It was pretty clear that he was in power and loving every little minute of it. The three men really wanted “Will” to join their company. They wanted him so bad that they agreed to pay ahead of time. It was Chuck’s lucky day!
What about Chuck and the gang? Surely Will can’t leave them! Wills autonomy is limited due to his probation, the therapy he’s forced to go to and the meetings with Lambeau. This however doesn’t mean he can’t have affiliation and intimacy. One night out hitting up the bars with his friends he meets a college student named Skylar. They start dating and have an intimate relationship. However, good things seem to come to an end. One night, Skylar ask Will to come to California with her, he turns her down thus causing a fight. Will becomes aggressive; he starts to yell, through his hands in the air and becomes very angry. The relationship between them ends. Chuck, Wills best friend, is part of Wills relatedness. Chuck makes Will feel belonged and at one point in the scene some very good advice. He says that if he had the talent that Will does he’d be gone, and he doesn’t want to see Will waste what he has. Each day, when Chuck drives up to Wills run down house he has his ten seconds of hope that Will won’t be there, and that he (Will) would leave without saying goodbye. He wants Will to become a leader and get out there.
Another friend that Will makes is Maguire. One of the most interesting parts of the movie was when Will is in Maguire’s office and sees the painting of the man in the boat. This leads into an engagement between the two. They really start to talk to one another. Not just because of the picture, or any of the other fights, but because of the relatedness.
The ending was the best part for me, not because Will goes after the girl in the end, but the last line by Maguire. Will gave up a lot to leave to California, his friends, his home and even his job, just like Maguire gave up going to the biggest baseball game. Although he doesn’t physically talk to Maguire he did write a far well letter to him. All in all, I thought the movie was pretty good. Might even have to watch it again!
Terms- reward, competition, intrinsic motivation, incentives, competence, consequence, extrinsic motivation, social needs, achievements, power, autonomy, affiliation, intimacy, aggressive, relatedness, engagement.
In the movie Good Will Hunting, Will is a very intelligent guy. He is a janitor at MIT School and sees a very complex math problem on a chalkboard in the hallway. He goes on to solve this math problem in a very short period of time. The problem that he solved took people years to solve. He then went on to solve another very complex math problem on the chalkboard in a matter of minutes. Will is intrinsically motivated to figure out these math problems. He is good at doing this kind of thing and so he is motivated to do these problems. When Will is put on parole he has to help a professor at MIT and go to therapy. When he is helping this professor by figuring out more complex math problems Will is both intrinsically and extrinsically motivated. He is extrinsically motivated because having to help the professor is a consequence for him. He beat up some guys and the consequence of this action was to solve these hard math problems.
Will has some autonomy before he is put on parole because he is working out the math problems on the chalkboard because he wants to. Once he is on parole and he is forced to work the math problems. Will has competence throughout the whole movie. By being able to solve the very hard math problems he is showing competence. Will has relatedness in this movie too. At first he isn’t really able to relate to anyone, but once he starts his parole this changes. He is able to relate to the professors that he works with because they understand the math that he is figuring out. He also has relatedness in his life when he starts seeing Skyler.
There are social needs that are met throughout the movie for Will. At the beginning of the movie he has three friends that he hangs out with everyday. Once he starts seeing Skyler another type of his social needs are also met. Everyone has the need for some type of achievement in their lives. Will achieves figuring out the really complicated math problems.
Terms used: intrinsic motivation, extrinsic motivation, autonomy, competence, relatedness, social needs
This movie provided many examples of the concepts we have been learning about. Describing Will is a good place to start. Will displayed a high need for power as did his 3 friends. He was aggressive and even violent. With that, he wanted to show competence in his abilities to be dominant in a situation. For example, at the beginning of the movie, he started a fight with a guy who used to pick on him. He wanted to prove his power that he did not always have. Another example is in the bar when he first met Skylar. He showed his power and dominance with his knowledge (to that college guy in front of Skylar). He wanted to show he had the power to stick up for his friend. He showed he achieved some competence in this situation by making the guy back down.
Will tried to fulfill his need for achievement by solving the problems on the board when he worked at MIT but they were too easy for him. The problems were not challenging. I’m not sure where he got his achievement from in the end. Maybe from finishing therapy, becoming close with Sean, or going after Skylar. I think his short term achievement was in learning and educating himself and from the competition of fighting. He also saw knowledge as a competition.
It was obvious that Will had a high need for autonomy. He did what he wanted to do and said what he wanted to say. I think a big example of this is how he learned on his own. He didn’t want anyone to teach him. Also, when he was going to the different therapists, he tried to show that he wasn’t willing to cooperate. I think Sean gave him autonomy support because he allowed Will to say nothing. He did not provoke him to talk. He waited until Will was ready to start talking and then he listened and provided feedback.
Will satisfied his need for relatedness with his 3 friends, Skylar, and eventually Sean. Will didn’t have many social bonds but the ones he had were important. His needs for affiliation and intimacy are hard for me to decipher. It seemed like he had a high need for affiliation but only with his friends he already had. It seemed that he had a low need for affiliation with anyone else. He wasn’t looking to please everybody and definitely didn’t need to get along with everyone.
Looking at Will from the outside, one would think he had a low need for intimacy. What we see watching the movie is that he and his friends are very close with each other. It seems they have been friends for a long time. They are always around each other and know a lot about one another. They obviously care about each other and would do anything for one another.
Will began his relationship with Sean in a power struggle. Will wanted to show that he could not be made to do anything (talk) and Sean wanted to show that he was going to continue with the sessions no matter what. They both thought they had the control. As their relationship progressed, Will’s need for intimacy was shown because he opened up to Sean and they got close. There was real caring and emotional connectedness between them by the end of the movie. If Will had a low need for intimacy, I don’t think their relationship would have gotten better. One reason I think Will allowed himself to develop an intimate relationship with Sean is because he wasn’t scared of rejection from Sean or of the relationship failing. This is a problem he had with Skylar.
Skylar and Will became pretty close but when it starts to get serious, Will uses avoidance. He is scared of the relationship failing so he doesn’t move to California with her. He doesn’t tell her he loves her even though he probably did. He basically ended the relationship because of his fears. If the relationship was over, the fear would be gone with it. Will finally moved past his avoidance of the situation because he really did need that intimate relationship with her. He did what he really wanted to do instead of letting his fears hold him back.
Terms: need, power, aggressive, competence, achievement, competition, autonomy, autonomy support, relatedness, social bonds, affiliation, intimacy, emotional connectedness, low/high need, avoidance
On the back of our book of motivation we are told that this course will help us understand questions like why did I do that? or Why do i feel this way? Wilt is a orphan boy, problematic and has wandered in different shelters in infancia.Wilt is a genius, but lose the time getting drunk with friends failed and work scrubbing the floor in harvard.
The question is what motivates a genius like this to act like this? because someone who could work in NASA work picking up trash?
From the perspective of internal or external motivation seems clear that despite being extremely intelligent he prefers, like more work with their friends in simple things and get drunk with them each tarde.Su intrinsic motivation is to do that. The problem comes when he is forced to go to therapy, job search and integrate into society, when you leave your comfort zone, ie, work and friends start to feel unsafe, despite all his talent when it is removed your routine becomes a frightened child. The reason I have so much trouble with his math teacher, the psychologist or finding work is that wilt not enjoy doing that, and positive reinforcement for his release after therapy does not seem enough.
I think to get away from all the physical abuse he suffered, wilt was becoming someone with a lot of autonomy, which in part after so much suffering that autonomy needs to feel free, and when it is conditioned by the psychologist and mathematician lost his notion of autonomy.
I read on page 163 of the book "Such emotion as sadness, depression, jealousy and loneliness exist as telltale signs of a Life Lived in the Absence of intimate, hi-quality, relatedness-satisfyng Relationships and social bonds" Wilt received some terrible abuses different shelters for which he was going as an orphan, so now you need to feel secure and backed by people close to him, with people who want, need high Affiliation and intimacy. That is one of the reasons why wilt never come out of Boston, has had deep relationships with girls or have gone to college, need to feel protected by his friends in his neighborhood, and if that fails for nothing makes sense.
Sometimes we wonder, how many Einsteins have been born in africa and will never know? In Africa, children have to think about eating a lot before becoming interested in mathematics, and wilt this is a very different needs the security of your environment is imortante like eating, so from a humanistic maslow say that Walt is still on the stair of the affiliation, desperately seeking the affiliation, for the abuses that were committed to make it much more difficult to jump up the stair of the self realization.
We can only hope that this trip from pacifyc goes well .........
ME terms: intrinsic and extrinsic motivation,incentives,punishers,psychological needs,autonomy,relatedness,afiliation,intimacy-
The first scene I want to discuss is the scene right near the beginning of the movie, Professor Gerald Lambeau has just posed a question to his math class. Will Hunting is the janitor at that school. He walks by the board and is starting to prove the equation. Professor Lambeau happens upon him and he runs away. Why does he do that? This question can be traced back to chapter 7 and social needs. The need in particular is the achievement need. There are three parts to the achievement need: performance-approach, performance-avoidance, and mastery. Will has no need for the performance-approached achievement need. He actually does not want to be recognized for this. His need is more of the mastery type needs. He wants to master subjects and learn. He struggles to find this combination of low recognition and mastery of subjects. He takes on obscure jobs so he has time to master the things he wants to learn, as well as keep it a secret. He is actually learning so he gets satisfaction out of it, but he does not want anyone to find out.
The next topic I want to discuss deals with affiliation, intimacy, and power. Will has needs for all three of these. He meets his affiliation need by hanging out with his friends. They understand that he is much more intelligent than he is, but accept him for who he is. They are able to joke with him like anyone else. They can relate to him. His need for intimacy is harder to fill. He exhibits avoidance behavior because does not want to let people know him for who he really is. However, after talking with Sean Maguire, he explores his intimacy need further by pursuing Skylar. Will fulfills his power need by showing control over the first few therapists that he sees. He meets with Sean and tries to meet his power need with him. This does not work and eventually with Sean’s help, meets his intimacy need with Skylar and Sean in different ways.
These ties into the psychological needs of autonomy, competence, and relatedness. Will needs to be autonomous, he is offered a multitude of options for his life, but being given choices does not mean the individual satisfies his or her autonomy need. Will ultimately needs to figure out his life on his own, and he does it. Will needs to satisfy his competence need as well. He struggles to do this because he cannot find things that challenge him. To satisfy a competence need, one needs to learn and exhibit progress on subjects that they did not know before. This is something Will cannot due. Professor Lambeau does not understand that. He cannot do the math problems so he feels that they are challenging. To Will, they are easy and he disregard them as a joke. It does not satisfy his need. Finally, Will has a relatedness need that needs to be fulfilled. He has his social interactions with his friends. He has struggled with this in the past. He had relationships but they were not ones that were satisfying his need. His relationships in his childhood were not warm, close, or affectionate. He has that with Skylar, but he is scared. His friends realize what potential he has and know that they cannot relate to Will like others can. Will needs to fulfill his relatedness need so he goes after Skylar in the end.
Terms: autonomy, competence, relatedness, social needs, achievement, performance-approach, mastery, affiliation, intimacy, and power.
Good Will Hunting is about an extremely intelligent man (Will Hunting) who doesn’t know what to do with his intelligence because the challenges he has faced in life left him a not-so-good place. He has a small group of friends that are always getting him into trouble, so he finds it hard to put everything he knows aside and pursue something entirely different. Because he is so used to the way his life is going, and has accepted that, he doesn’t have much motivation to really go anywhere…until he meets a therapist and a girl who changes his life.
As stated in Chapter 7, there are two theories you can use for someone who is highly intelligent: entity theory or incremental theory. The Entity Theorists would say that Will was born intelligent. He didn’t have to work hard to achieve that, it just happened to him. The Incremental Theorists have the opposite view. They would say that Will had to work really hard and have incredible motivation in order to achieve that level of intelligence. Based on the movie, I would say that the Entity Theorists would probably be right. Will didn’t seem very motivated at all to do anything with the intelligence he had. He pretty much wanted to ignore it, so my guess was he was just born that smart. I can’t see him as having much motivation to achieve intelligence if he wasn’t motivated to do anything with it.
Chapter seven also talks about the social need of Achievement. The book describes achievement as “the desire to do well relative to a standard of excellence”. This is what would motivate people to pursue success and compete for a standard of excellence. I would say that Will had a fairly low need for achievement early on in the movie. He didn’t really seem motivated to go anywhere in life and was content with where he was at. There are three main influences on a person’s motivation towards Achievement: socialization, cognitive, and developmental. I would say Will had some social influences that really pushed him to excel academically. Two of these would be Sean and Skylar. They motivated him by setting high aspirations, realistic standards of excellence (for him), putting him in an environment rich in potential, etc. The list could go on and on. Some cognitive influences would be the hope and pride that Will got from Sean and Skylar especially. If will hadn’t ever had anyone to believe in him, the fact that those two gave up such positive emotions would be motivation to do well.
TERMS: entity theory; incremental theory; motivation; social need; achievement; socialization influence; cognitive influence; developmental influence;
All of the social needs are displayed throughout this movie. In the beginning, Will Hunting is a custodian at a college and notices a difficult math problem on the chalk board. He is then intrinsically motivated to solve it and shows engagement because the equation captured his attention so he took the problem home, finished it, and wrote the answer on the chalk board when he got back to work the next day. His motivation came from within because he is good at those them and proves his competence. Will had a low need for achievement, as he could do all of these equations but was happy being a construction worker with his friends. When Professor Gerald Lambeau, someone with an obviously high need for achievement, discovers this math genius, he helps get him out of jail and eventually after spending a good amount of time with him, Gerald sets up interviews for prestigious jobs for Will, thus providing Will with extrinsic motivation for something he already enjoyed. As you probably guessed, there is a definite hidden cost of reward played out by this. He shows that he is starting not to like doing it anymore when he exclaims to Professor Lambeau that he does not want to spend the rest of his life sitting around trying to explain something to others that comes so easily to him. He also sends his friend Chuckie to one job interview and totally dismisses a government job offer himself. I believe Will did not feel as though he had any choice or say in the decision-making of these interviews; therefore, his need for Autonomy was also not being satisfied by these interviews. While Will is forced to see a psychologist once a week as a part of his deal to get out of jail. From Will’s point of view, having to go see a psychologist once a week at first seemed like positive punishment because it was adding something he viewed as negative to his situation; however, not having to go to jail is a negative reinforcer because it is taking away something negative. He goes through five psychologists before Professor Lambeau calls on old friend and roommate, Psychologist Sean Maguire for help. Professor Lambeau and Sean have a long past of competing performance goals where they have always tried to be better than their friend. Professor Lambeau seems to have a stronger need for Power than does Sean as he has moved on to like the attention he receives for his accomplishments and from his students. He seems to like the influence over other people. Upon one of their first sessions, Will notices a painting done by Sean and tries to decode Sean’s life via the painting by saying he married the wrong women. At this point Sean is overwhelmed with anger and grief for his deceased wife that he proceeds to grab Will’s neck, slam him into the wall, and tells him to never speak of his wife that way again. Sean lost his most important communal relationship when his wife died, so his need for relatedness is probably always nagging at him in the back of his mind. He still talks lovingly about his wife, satisfying his intimacy need by still getting a good feeling by loving and remembering her and all her perfection. Likewise, Will has a need for relatedness that is not being truly fulfilled until he meets and forms a communal relationship with Skylar. Will’s need for affiliation shows when he is afraid of what Skylar might think of his past life or his apartment because he is striving to seem normal and to be good enough for her. He feels as though he won’t meet her standard of excellence. Professor Lambeau and Sean also have different standards of excellence they wish to see Will match. Lambeau wants Will to take one of the prestigious jobs and use his skills to become remembered and successful while Sean just wants him to overcome his past and own his own life without fear of growing too close to others. Both seem to want to see Will accomplish things that they each wish to conquer respectively. In the end both Sean and Will have mastery goals to improve the self—Will by chasing down what he truly wants and learning to let someone into his life, and Sean by branching out, seeing the world, and getting on with his life which has been so difficult for him.
Terms: Intrinsic motivation, extrinsic motivation, autonomy, competence, relatedness, hidden costs, rewards, Negative reinforcement, Positive punishment, communal relationship, engagement, social needs, achievement, affiliation, intimacy, power, standard of excellence, mastery goals, performance goals.
The first concept I chose to discuss is intrinsic behavior. The movie Good Will Hunting exemplifies this concept throughout the story. Will Hunting is a genius of an individual working as a janitor as MIT. When a math professor, Gerry, gives his class a challenging equation to solve, Will ends up solving it. The teacher is stunned anyone was able to solve it and seeks out to find who did solve it. Intrinsic behavior is acting on what is interesting yet challenging to an individual. It is ironic in the beginning, that Will is a janitor when it is evident he could be doing numerous challenging tasks with his life. For him, being the janitor was an extrinsic motivator because he was seeking the money but in a sense, he chose to do this job at a difficult and challenging school. Maybe he wanted the challenge and lacked the opportunity.
Will's incentive as a janitor is money, he knows that job will not take him anywhere near the level he could succeed at. After Will gets in trouble with the law and Gerry realizes he is the one who completed his equation he gives him an opportunity to stay out of jail. If Will studied with Gerry and sought therapeutic help, he was rewarded by staying out of jail. Gerry, I think, was working extrinsically because he was seeking out praise for Will's work. He wanted Will to be known and recognized and Gerry could then be associated with him. Will wanted no part of that.
The next concept I chose was relatedness. This is a huge psychological need for humans. At the beginning of the movie, it seemed as Will lacked relatedness, or the feeling of belonging. But as the movie progressed you see how important Will's friends are to him. They have his back and he feels like he belongs. But Will's therapist Sean brings to his attention that he can get relatedness in an even more intimate relationship. This is difficult for Will because he was an orphan and abandoned and abused throughout his childhood. His trust was broken and his guard was up. Sean keeps insisting for him to give his girlfriend Skylar a chance but will is resistant. Will lacks the ability to perceive a positive relationship from anyone since he trust was broken early in his life. Skylar gives plenty of positive reinforcement throughout the movie, almost never giving up hope. Will has internalized the idea of being hurt, he took what he knew and experienced from his past and set up his expectations from there.
The final concept I chose was related to Will's social needs. There is a scene where Gerry is trying to get Will to accept a job offer. Will turns it down because he doesn't want to teach something to other people that is so easy. Will does not want to feel lack of achievement. He wants a challenge and accepting that job was not going to offer that. In relation to Skylar, we see his tendency to avoid failure. He confessed to Sean he does not want to disappoint her and let her see the real Will. This is huge. But Will has goals, he wants to do something honorable. He does not act on these until the end when he drives to see Skylar after turning down another job opportunity.
TERMS: Intrinsic motivation, Extrinsic motivation, Reward, Incentive, Perception, Achievement, Relatedness, Positive reinforcement, Internalization, and tendency to avoid failure.
Good Will Hunting is a great movie to watch when studying psychological and social needs. Social needs are not as biologically demanding as physiological needs but they are just as important for an overall sense of well-being and in order to achieve self-actualization.
Throughout the movie, we can see that the character of Will Hunting is in a far different situation as far as needs go than Chuck was on Cast Away. Will’s physiological needs are being met even though it is obvious he doesn’t have a lot of money. To a great extent, his three major psychological needs (autonomy, competence and relatedness) are being met as well. Will is an autonomous person. With the exception of having a probation officer he exercises his autonomy daily by going where he wants, with whomever he wants, any time he wants. He can work anywhere that he wants as well. He is incredibly smart and because of that it gives him an unlimited amount of freedom in his choice of career.
Will’s need for competence is met for the most part as well. He is effective in his interactions and decides when he wants to use his skills master challenges. He demonstrated his competence by solving the theorem on the chalkboard in the hall. It seems that he knows exactly how intelligent he is and it is obvious that he figured that out by learning something and then taking it to the next level and the next level until he knew the subject inside out. He had simply run out of things to challenge his competence.
Finally, his need for relatedness was already met prior to his relationship skylark and the professor and the therapist. Although it lacked intimacy, he did have social interaction and tight group of friends that were very loyal to him and to each other and vice versa. He desired a sense of belongingness and he got that but what it lacked was one of the four social needs which is intimacy.
Of the four social needs discussed in our text (achievement, affiliation, intimacy and power) I feel that intimacy was the need that Will Hunting lacked the most and the one that he needed the most in order to find out who he was and what he wanted to do. He had to let go of the past to move forward the future. Although I stated above that Will’s need for relatedness was met given his close group of friends, it was clear that Will didn’t share with them the intimate details of his life. Instead, he rarely talked about his personal feelings and the closest that his friends got to witnessing his inner demons was when he was getting in a fight and couldn’t stop hitting the guy.
Will ends up liking Skylar more than any other girl he has been with. This forces him to confront his intimacy need for a warm, emotional and close relationship with someone. It frightens him and he pushes her away. His therapist, Sean, realizes this need and uses intimate details of his own life to get Will to open up and trust him. Eventually, Will breaks down and tells both Skylar and Sean some intimate details which shake him after being kept inside for so long. In the end, we sense that Will has learned how to meet his social needs for both achievement and intimacy much better and I think that looking even deeper past that, he has formed a warm and close relationship with Sean which Sean needed as well.
Learning about different psychological and social needs really made me view this movie differently than I ever had before. I had a great time applying what I’ve learned about these needs to this movie.
ME Terms: psychological needs, social needs, self-actualization, intimacy, affiliation, power, acheivement, autonomy, competence, relatedness
In the movie "Good Will Hunting", there are many examples of needs displayed throughout the film. After reviewing over the movie, I thought the best way to address the topic of needs was to compare and contrast the relationship between Will and Professor Lambeau and then the relationship between Will and psychiatrist Sean Maguire. This is because both relationships would strive for different types of motivation.
Professor Lambeau looked to satisfy both his and Will's extrinsic motivation. Extrinsic motivation can be considered to be ignited by a "in order to do" motivator. This meaning that you do something for something. Extrinsic motivation can be seen as a what's in it for me attitude. Their relationship is formed like this because Professor Lambeau is extrinsically motivated. He does his work in order to gain respect, notoriety, and the heavy pay does not hurt. This is why Lambeau entered into the career in which he did because he was to fulfill all his wants and "needs". He got the respect from his student and faculty, won the Field prize, and was being paid well. Being motivated in this type of way speaks of his own needs. He feels the need to be high in competency, achievement, and power. This is why he tried to lure Will into his world with many incentives. He hopes that by showing this poor, disturbed, young man, that there is a way to live the dream (again, power, wealth, fame) that will will become attracted to this environment and will want to mimic Lambeau's behavior.
It becomes rather apparent upon the introduction of psychiatrist Sean Maguire, that Maguire is much more lax and indeed extrinsically motivated. First, his career of choosing to go into psychology already hints that he cares more about working with people then above people. Picking a career like would also indicate that Sean has a high need for competency as well. However, he also has a high need for relatedness. He wants to be able to get close to people and make them trust him. In his opening scene he poses the question of why is it important to get the patient's trust. Throughout the movie as well, he tries to teach Will about the importance of experience, love, and happiness. He tries to make Will see that these are what the most important things in life are. He teaches him this through speaking of his own experience. Growing up in the same neighborhood, Sean tries to bring about a sense of relatedness. He knows that Will does not get a lot of this because of his situation and also because of his gifts. He is unable to fit in with the smart, rich kids, but needs to dumb himself down in order to relate to the friends that are more accepting of him.
In order to fully understand these relationships, we need to examine Will. Will is a young man who has been negatively reinforced throughout his whole life. Bouncing around from different foster homes and suffering from abuse, Will never really experienced any love or direction. So, due to the fact that Will was unable to form loving, caring bonds with anyone in his early childhood he was negatively reinforced into believing that relationships are not meant having. Since he forced away the need for affiliation and intimacy, Will demonstrated high aggressiveness. In the chapter it speaks about how aggressiveness is not something that is praised within our society, and this is shown in the movie. When Will got into the fight, he was arrested, and his aggression is what caused him to go to therapy and work it out.
Will expresses much of the avoidance theory. In both career and in personal life, he fears failure, so he avoids performing goals, he becomes maladjusted, and then deals with his own way of dealing with it. He goes about trying to fulfill is quasi-needs, which are needs which basically only occur within the heat of the moment. If he becomes angry he wants to fight, if he wants to talk he will, if he doesn't he won't. Also, you can say that his constant need to smoke is also a quasi-need.
Lambeau and Sean try to show Will that there are different ways to go about living. Ultimately, Will realizes he does not want to do math the rest of his life and only work for a job, but want to find love, intimacy, and happiness. He realizes that since his social needs where not met early on in life, he needs to fulfill that social need now, and he finds that in Skylar. Both Sean and Skylar positively reinforced Will by responding to his friendship and accepting him as he is. Their friendship helped him realize he can have happiness.
Terms: intrinsic motivation, extrinsic motivation, positive reinforcer, negative reinforcer, autonomy, competence, relatedness, aggressiveness, power, affiliation & intimacy, achievement, avoidance theory, social needs, quasi-needs
One of the biggest issues Will has is the tendency to avoid failure. He never looks at the glass as half full, he always sees it as half empty. One of the ways Will displays his tendency is in his relationship with Skylar. When he first meets Skylar he shows off to her by outsmarting a guy he knows he can beat at the bar. Then he hangs out with her and soon stops calling and seeing her for a while because he likes her just the way she is and he is scared he will find out something different about her and not like her anymore. Skylar later asks Will to move to California with her. Will does not understand why she would want something like that. He asks her all kinds of questions like, what if you found out something about me you don't like, what if you find out something about my past you don't approve of, what if we just end up not liking each other? Then we (Will and Skylar) will be stuck with someone who we don't want to be with. He does not understand that Skylar wants to get to know him, wants to know about his past and will not judge him about it, and that she really cares about him. Before Skylar leaves she tells Will she loves him and if he says I don't love you back then she wont call him anymore so he says it, even though he does not mean it just to avoid failing in a relationship.
Another why Will shows his tendency is when he does not take his job offers that he was extrinsically motivated to go to. for one of the jobs he explains to them why. He asks them, "What if I crack a code to the location of some terrorist and you bomb the town he is in and injure hundreds of innocent people?" He didn't want to be a part of that and feel that he fail himself in standing what he believes in which gave him the incentive not to take that job. He later explains that he is motivated to build houses because he knows it will make someone's life better someday and it will make a difference and he fells that is important. Being able to help out someone else makes Will fell like he is a success. It also explains why he does not want to leave where he lives and what he does. He knows that he is successful at what he does where he is and feels that moving elsewhere could result in failure in so many ways.
When it came to talking to psychiatrists Will did not want to, he had no intrinsic motivation to talk to the. He felt he didn't need any help. He also knew that he did not know the answers to some of the questions like what he wants to do, so he would make them feel like he was impossible to talk to and quit. Avoiding all of these things help Will avoid failure, embarrassment, loss of social respect, and the loss of self esteem.
Will is also a good example of the Entity Theory. They believe people have a fixed amount of intelligence, that people are basically born smart or not smart. According to this theory Will was born extremely intelligent when it came to learning things in books. This shows why it was so easy for Will to read information and remember it right away and so hard for Skylar, and the reason she had to study a lot. Will also states that he does not know how to play the piano but Beethoven and Bach did, and did very well at it. That shows that he was not born with the ability to play and understand the piano like Bach and Beethoven.
When it came to affiliation Will has a relatively low need. He has his small group of friends and does not care to have many more. He knows that he friends he currently has are willing to do anything for him and are always there to support him and most important, wont hurt him. His low need for affiliation is very apparent when he is very aggressive and rude towards Sean, his psychiatrist. He does not trust him in any way and does not feel the need to let him in. Later in the movie Sean and Will make a connection about how they were both abused growing up and makes Will feel that Sean really does care about him and understand where he comes from, so for a short time before Will leaves they become friends. Then he leaves everything he has back home to go to California and fulfill hes need for affiliation and intimacy with Skylar. This also displays that he is low in this need because he leaves everything behind to be with just one person and no one else.
Terms: Tendency to avoid failure, Entity theory, motivated, incentive, intrinsic motivation, extrinsic motivation, affiliation, intimacy.
Good Will Hunting blog (2/24/11)
In this movie I see the three primary characters: Will, Dr. Jerry Lambeau and his old roommate, Professor Sean McGuire. Each one of these characters is differently motivated by values or need basis. These individuals and their individual characteristics become engaged with the intention of improving Will’s life and his life experiences. The movie is about how their lives interact and how they impact each other.
The main character Will is living a life he knows well at the beginning of the movie. He knows how to function within his environment and he seems relatively happy. He would probably describe most days as “good days” because he is involved when he wants to be involved in daily life, and he is satisfying the psychological needs that he is aware of. Will and his best friend Chuck, along with Morgan and Bill live a communal yet supportive social bond of engagement within their friendships, they have spent a lot of time together due to the proximity in which they live. They are loyal to one another and have a level of trust between them.
Will seems as though he is lacking in any real vitality or depth in his life. He seems as though he has lived his entire life motivated to get by social constraints of the law, the social services and the educational institutions. Will may have unconsciously taken the janitorial job at Harvard just to see if he could measure up or compare normatively without anyone knowing or checking up on him based on performance in educational comparisons with an ivy league college. When Dr. Jerry Lambeau discovers Will’s abilities, he is fascinated and he seeks to “help this kid” for his own benefit of notoriety in his field of mathematical theorem solving.
Dr. Lambeau exemplifies an individual motivated by power, affiliation and competition aspects in academia. He goes out of his way to speak to the judge just to control Will and this supports the power and goal pursuit from chapter seven in the text. It is evident that Lambeau is high in need for affiliation because he cannot sleep at night because of Will’s abilities; of which I am sure he feels is a waist if he personally cannot influence Will the way he wants to. Lambeau wants to improve his power and prestige within the elite world of academia and Will is his ticket to this accomplishment his. Lambeau is shocked at one point because Will places such little value on the instituted hierarchy within the most influential occupations known in the United States. The difference in motivation values is the source of hard feelings between the once roommate of Lambeau’s, which is Sean McGuire .
Sean McGuire is an interesting person because he gave up the pursuit of power and prestige that resonates so strongly with Jerry Lambeau for Autonomy, competence and relatedness because of his relationship with his wife Nancy. Chapter six talks about the person-environment Dialectic that Sean found within his soul-mate Nancy; who Sean willingly sacrificed his personal and professional life for. Sean wanted to spend his time with his wife as she physically deteriorated due to her cancer, he chose to learn compassion and human connection dispite loss.
It’s very interesting to see how Will uses his knowledge as a weapon or as negative reinforcement to shut down challenges or questions about his personal life that he is fighting to suppress from surfacing because it was so abusive. At one point in the bar he uses his photographic memory and his sharp tongue to shut down a conversation that was intended to put his buddy Chuck down. Despite the fact that Will seems to be able to manipulate and dominate his social world and that he projects a high perceived locus of control, Sean challenges his intrinsic motivation. Sean keeps asking Will what he wants to do and what he is passionate about and Will cannot answer these simple questions.
It seems that Will and Sean’s therapy sessions are dialectic in nature because as Sean challenges Will to take a chance and be vulnerable in love and to feel with his heart. Will then turns the conversation and challenges Sean because he is a burnout; he’s given up when he should “get out there with his cards on the table,” so to speak.
By the end of the movie Will seems ready to take a chance with Skylar to engage deeply on an emotional, behavioral and a cognitive level to actually encourage connectedness in a vulnerable way in order to obtain an intimacy level even if there is a chance of losing, Will is ready to step out of his comfort level and this supports the incremental theory that chapter seven talks about.
ME terms: “good days”, vitality, communal motivated needs/values and characteristics, life expectancies impact, proximity and time, normative comparisons, performance based social constraint motivators, power, affiliation, competition, personal influences and occupations, negative reinforcers, perceived locus of control, extent of engagement, dialectic relationships, emotional, behavioral and cognitive levels, intimacy and incremental theory.
The movie Good Will Hunting shows the main character Will in a struggle to meet his psychological needs and the expectations of others. Will has a high need for autonomy. Autonomy is the psychological need to experience self-direction and personal endorsement in the initiation and regulation of one’s behavior. Will wants to decide himself, what to do, when to do it, and how to do it. Will is not happy about being forced to sit face to face with a psychologist as part of his punishment for fighting. As a result, he manages to upset and scare off five counselors before meeting Sean McGuire. When it comes to choosing a career, Will feels coerced into joining the elite and competitive job market that Professor Lambeau throws him into. Professor Lambeau assumes that Will experiences the same quasi-needs that other college students feel. Quasi-needs are situationally induced wants and desires that are not actually full-blown needs in the same sense that physiological, psychological, and social needs are. A set of quasi-needs that commonly gains the attention of college students is that for money, a secure job, and a career plan. Sean McGuire as a psychologist and a friend recognizes that Will needs to act out of volition in order to find happiness and grow as a person. Volition is an unpressured willingness to engage in an activity. Will also has a high need for competence. Competence is the psychological need to be effective in interactions with the environment, and it reflects the desire to exercise one’s capacities and skills and, in doing so, to seek out and master optimal challenges. Will uses his job as a janitor at a prestigious university to bring him closer to the challenges that he enjoys. Professor Lambeau offers an incentive to the top students at the university if they can solve a very difficult theorem. An incentive is defined as an environmental event that attracts or repels a person toward or away from a particular course of action. The students would be extrinsically motivated to solve the theorem, but not of them is able to complete it. However, Will is able to solve it very quickly. Will decides to work on the problems because of intrinsic motivation. Intrinsic motivation is the inherent propensity to engage one’s interests and to exercise one’s capacities and, in doing so, to seek out and master optimal challenges. Will obviously experiences flow as he diligently and eagerly works out the problems on the chalk board. Flow is a state of concentration that involves a holistic absorption and deep involvement in an activity. When caught working on the problem, Will curses at the professor and runs away. Will clearly does not want anyone to know how intelligent he is. Will struggles throughout the movie to balance his social needs. We experience social needs as emotional and behavioral potentials that are activated by particular situational incentives. Social needs include achievement, affiliation, intimacy, and power. The need for achievement is the desire to do well relative to a standard of excellence. One scene in the movie demonstrates the difference between the two main achievement goals. One of Will’s friends is belittled by a long blond haired “Michael Bolton Clone.” The guy tries to show off in front of a woman named Skyler by rattling off quotes from literature and passing it off as his own opinion. This blond guy in the bar is demonstrates that he has performance achievement goals. He is trying to display his ability and prove his competence to others and acts like he is better than Will’s friend. Will on the other hand shows mastery achievement goals. With mastery goals, the person facing the standard of excellence seeks to develop greater competence, make progress, improve the self, and overcome challenges through intense and persistent effort. He has read many books out of interest and has a genuine knowledge and personal opinion about the topics. Skyler sees through the fake blonde and eventually becomes Will’s girlfriend. This scene also demonstrates Will’s need for relatedness. Relatedness is the psychological need to establish close emotional bonds and attachments with other people, and it reflects the desire to be emotionally connected to and interpersonally involved in warm relationships. Will appears to have formed healthy social bonds between himself and a few of his close friends because they care about each other and like each other for their “true self.” He also forms a strong bond with Sean because of the trust he gained. Relatedness to others is important because it provides the social context that supports internalization, which is the process through which one person takes in and accepts as his or her own another person’s belief, value, or way of behaving. If any of the other therapists tried to tell Will that he was lacking experience and intimacy, he never would have listened. However, Will valued Sean’s opinions and internalized his values of taking risks for love which was terrifying at first. Will was severely abused as a child and was bounced around to foster homes. These hard experiences growing up caused him not to pursue intimacy with others. The need for intimacy is the social motive for engaging in warm, close, positive interpersonal relationships that produce positive emotions and hold little threat of rejection. Because of his rough past, Will adopted performance-avoidance goals because of his fear of failure in intimate relationships. Between Skyler and Sean Will learns to let go of his insecurities and experience intimacy. Ultimately, Will leaves his comfort zone in order to go chase the woman of his dreams.
Terms: psychological needs, autonomy, quasi-needs, volition, competence, incentive, extrinsic motivation, intrinsic motivation, flow, social needs, achievement, performance achievement goals, mastery achievement goals, relatedness, social bond, internalization, intimacy, performance avoidance goals
This is a great movie! I have seen this movie before and I think it is a movie that makes you wonder about motivation and emotion even before one knows the correct terminology. Will, the main character is a young man who has been in and out of foster homes his whole life. As a child he was badly beaten. This horrific childhood caused a great deal of damage by depriving him of several important psychological and social needs. I think Will was starved of his needs as a child and when he was old enough to be on his own he probably sought out to fulfill what needs he could, autonomy. I think Will needed to feel control over his life since he had little control in his past and was eager to fulfill the need for autonomy. I think Will was pleased just to be fulfilling one need (autonomy), as opposed to being completely deprived and so Will would not risk anything to fulfill other needs. I think that Will was so afraid of being hurt in a relationship and scared of failing in life that he focused on having control, being independent, and being able to do only what he wants. He was terrified that he might lose the only thing he had, (autonomy), so he became very defensive. He was not able to fulfill other needs, especially the needs for affiliation and intimacy.
Because Will went for so long deprived from many needs, Will’s social needs actually adapted. Will learned to be low on intimacy and high on power. One example of Will fulfilling his need for power is when Will asks his friend to pull over so they can jump his kindergarten enemy. This is Will’s way of proving to himself that he has control, autonomy, and power. Will continues to fulfill this need by getting away with his illegal acts and acting out in aggressive ways. The fact that Will can get out of a jail sentence probably pleases him to a great extent. This again is fulfilling his very high need for power. Will is able to get out of his jail/probation sentences by his knowledge. I think Will must have realized that Knowledge is power early on in his life. Because Will understood the importance of knowledge he was intrinsically motivated to learn. This gained knowledge also fulfilled his need for competence. Will also demonstrates his ability to fulfill his competence need by outsmarting a Harvard student at the bar.
As a low-income janitor at MIT Will experienced intrinsic motivation for advanced mathematical problems outside of a classroom. He enjoyed these difficult problems even though he was not in a class and there were no incentives for doing this task. He was experiencing volition. In the beginning of the movie you see Will interacting with friends and so we see that Will is fulfilling he need for relatedness but these relationships are not intimate.
When Will is forced to meet with the professor who is intrigued by Will’s brilliance, he begins to hate the mathematical equations. The fact that Will is being forced to do tasks that he enjoyed doing on his own changed his motivation from intrinsic to extrinsic. He no longer found this type of work enjoyable. The professor is actually undermining Will’s motivation and Will’s sense of autonomy. Will continued to lose his sense of autonomy, power, and competence when he was forced to see a therapist. Will made a mockery out of these therapists just to prove that he was competent and had his independence. When Will was brought to Sean Maguire, another therapist, Will met his match. I Will was intrigued by Sean. Maybe Will seen Sean at first to be a challenge. In their first meeting it’s almost like a competition of lies. The therapist actually “wins” at Will’s game of bullshitting. This threatens Will and as a defensive mechanism Will tries to physically threaten Sean, ensuring to himself that he has not lost his power. Sean is intrinsically motivated to help Will and Sean knows that what Will needs is love, intimate relationship and being able to let someone in. On the second session, Sean makes it known to Will that Will may be competent and knowledgeable however Will knows nothing about love or what it feels like. Sean also tells Will personal information about his wife and how she died. I think this allowed Will to trust that Sean was an honest man and that he honestly wanted to help. This relationship slowly builds to an intimate relationship through each session as Will begins to let Sean in.
Will also meets a girl that he falls for. In the beginning she seeks an intimate relationship with Will and this scares Will. He does not want to again be deprived of his needs. Finally Sean rationalizes the importance of growth and developing. Will needs to grow up and needs to take a risk by letting others in making intimate relationships. Will eventually forms an intimate relationship with Sean and this gives him motivation to seek other intimate relationships. By the end of the movie Will is fulfilling all of his needs and adjusting his need for intimacy.
Terms; social needs, psychological needs, autonomy, affiliation, intimacy, incentives, competence, relatedness, intrinsic motivation, extrinsic motivation, volition
In the movie Good Will Hunting, a lot of needs were presented as well as a lot of different motivations. By having a job as a janitor, Will faces the incentive of money. He obviously does not do this job for intrinsic purposes. He does, however, read books and study subjects, especially math, for intrinsic reasons; he just enjoys it and he is good at it. Extrinsic motivation is put into the equation when Gerry comes and offers an incentive to get Will out of his jail predicament. However, this does lead to his intrinsic motivation being called into question. As he continues to show off his ingenius, job offers and mathematicians that want to be shown his work are presented to him, which can make the subject not fun anymore. These rewards really do not appeal to Will. He is content where he is at in his life (or so he says).
Will confronts a lot of needs in this movie, all psychological. First, Will has a high need for autonomy. He does not like being bossed around. He likes to rule his own life. This also deals with all the math stuff; Gerry is not letting him have the high volition he used to have, and this makes his motivation decreases because he is being more pressured into focusing everything on being a math genius. In the end, when Will decides to not take the job he said he would and go after Skylar, he finally reached his perceived choice. This gave him the most autonomy out of the whole movie because he finally had control of his life.
Second, his need for competence was addressed. When Will first solved that theorem at MIT, the one the professor had already solved, his competence was normal. Throughout the movie, Gerry would continue to throw harder and harder proofs at Will, thinking they would challenge him as they did for other mathematicians. This was not the case. Because Will's skill level was so high, there was no challenge anymore and he was bored. Will no longer had flow. This astonished Gerry and the other professors because they were way below skill-wise than Will. They carried anxiety when trying to solve these proofs over years of time.
The third psychological need discussed in the movie was relatedness. Will had a hard time forming new relationships with people because of his trust issue. Yes, he did have communal relationships with his three friends, especially Chuck, and Sean and Skylar would switch from exchange to communal, but Will did not know how to keep these new relationships if they knew the real him. Both Skylar and Sean used positive reinforcement to help the relationships transform. Skylar was always there for him and never gave up hope; she made sure Will knew her thoughts and feelings. Sean used positive reinforcement by letting Will open up to him in his own time and made sure to ask the right questions without hovering. Sean also made Will aware that he knew about the negative punishment he went through as a kid and let him know that he understood because he had been there and it wasn't his fault.
Social needs were also very prominent in the Will's life. First, Will's need for achievement was low. He did not feel like having a big fancy math job was any better than laying bricks. However, the standard of excellence set for him by Gerry was higher than Will wanted. This kind of manipulated Will into thinking he had to take the job, which, in the end, he realized he didn't have to do if it wasn't what he wanted. Will was also very reluctant to progress into anything new because of his inhibition or tendency to avoid failure. He was a entity theorist and was very performance goal-oriented. Will believed he was who he was and he couldn't change (at first at least). He always had to prove his competence and was constantly outperforming other people (not to hurt them, of course).
Finally, Will lacked the need for affiliation and intimacy. This could be largely due to the lack thereof when he was growing up in different foster homes and being physically abused. He never avoided conflict, in fact he practically went looking for it. He never needed approval or reassurance from anyone. The first time reassurance hit home was when he was in Sean's office and Sean told him that what happened to him as a kid was not his fault. Will did gain a need for affiliation and intimacy through Skylar. He realized that she was his soulmate and that she was the missing piece of his puzzle all this time. That is why he decided to go after her instead of staying where he was comfortable. He wanted to challenge himself for the first time in life.
ME Terms: Intrinsic motivation, extrinsic motivation, incentives, positive reinforcement, negative punishment, rewards, psychological needs, autonomy, volition, perceived choice, competence, flow, relatedness, communal relationships, exchange relationships, social needs, achievement, standard of excellence, tendency to avoid failure, inhibition, performance goals, entity theorists, affiliation, intimacy.
In the movie Good Will Hunting, a lot of needs were presented as well as a lot of different motivations. By having a job as a janitor, Will faces the incentive of money. He obviously does not do this job for intrinsic purposes. He does, however, read books and study subjects, especially math, for intrinsic reasons; he just enjoys it and he is good at it. Extrinsic motivation is put into the equation when Gerry comes and offers an incentive to get Will out of his jail predicament. However, this does lead to his intrinsic motivation being called into question. As he continues to show off his ingenius, job offers and mathematicians that want to be shown his work are presented to him, which can make the subject not fun anymore. These rewards really do not appeal to Will. He is content where he is at in his life (or so he says).
Will confronts a lot of needs in this movie, all psychological. First, Will has a high need for autonomy. He does not like being bossed around. He likes to rule his own life. This also deals with all the math stuff; Gerry is not letting him have the high volition he used to have, and this makes his motivation decreases because he is being more pressured into focusing everything on being a math genius. In the end, when Will decides to not take the job he said he would and go after Skylar, he finally reached his perceived choice. This gave him the most autonomy out of the whole movie because he finally had control of his life.
Second, his need for competence was addressed. When Will first solved that theorem at MIT, the one the professor had already solved, his competence was normal. Throughout the movie, Gerry would continue to throw harder and harder proofs at Will, thinking they would challenge him as they did for other mathematicians. This was not the case. Because Will's skill level was so high, there was no challenge anymore and he was bored. Will no longer had flow. This astonished Gerry and the other professors because they were way below skill-wise than Will. They carried anxiety when trying to solve these proofs over years of time.
The third psychological need discussed in the movie was relatedness. Will had a hard time forming new relationships with people because of his trust issue. Yes, he did have communal relationships with his three friends, especially Chuck, and Sean and Skylar would switch from exchange to communal, but Will did not know how to keep these new relationships if they knew the real him. Both Skylar and Sean used positive reinforcement to help the relationships transform. Skylar was always there for him and never gave up hope; she made sure Will knew her thoughts and feelings. Sean used positive reinforcement by letting Will open up to him in his own time and made sure to ask the right questions without hovering. Sean also made Will aware that he knew about the negative punishment he went through as a kid and let him know that he understood because he had been there and it wasn't his fault.
Social needs were also very prominent in the Will's life. First, Will's need for achievement was low. He did not feel like having a big fancy math job was any better than laying bricks. However, the standard of excellence set for him by Gerry was higher than Will wanted. This kind of manipulated Will into thinking he had to take the job, which, in the end, he realized he didn't have to do if it wasn't what he wanted. Will was also very reluctant to progress into anything new because of his inhibition or tendency to avoid failure. He was a entity theorist and was very performance goal-oriented. Will believed he was who he was and he couldn't change (at first at least). He always had to prove his competence and was constantly outperforming other people (not to hurt them, of course).
Finally, Will lacked the need for affiliation and intimacy. This could be largely due to the lack thereof when he was growing up in different foster homes and being physically abused. He never avoided conflict, in fact he practically went looking for it. He never needed approval or reassurance from anyone. The first time reassurance hit home was when he was in Sean's office and Sean told him that what happened to him as a kid was not his fault. Will did gain a need for affiliation and intimacy through Skylar. He realized that she was his soulmate and that she was the missing piece of his puzzle all this time. That is why he decided to go after her instead of staying where he was comfortable. He wanted to challenge himself for the first time in life.
ME Terms: Intrinsic motivation, extrinsic motivation, incentives, positive reinforcement, negative punishment, rewards, psychological needs, autonomy, volition, perceived choice, competence, flow, relatedness, communal relationships, exchange relationships, social needs, achievement, standard of excellence, tendency to avoid failure, inhibition, performance goals, entity theorists, affiliation, intimacy.
Good Will Hunting is a stellar movie about Matt Damon as Will who is an underachieving genius. However, he doesn't feel he is underachieving. He is pleased in his life because he feels that his needs are met--loyal but ne'er-do-well friends, a job as a janitor, and a home. However, a professor he meets believes he needs something more. Professor Lambeau believes he should use his full potential and put his math skills to work in a high-status position.
Will was smarter than all of Lambeau's students but believes that paying for information that you can learn from books in a library is ludicrous. He was able to solve a complex math proof posed by the professor that was meant to challenge his students for the whole semester. Then, when a second, harder, problem was posted, he solved that one, too, without difficulty. When he didn't fess up to solving it, the professor searched for him, found him in legal trouble due to a fight, and took over as his parole executor with the conditions that Will would work with Lambeau on math as well as attend counseling sessions.
Will wanted the autonomy he derived from learning on his own and not being affiliated with the university. He wanted to be in charge of his own life and not under anyone else's thumb. He avoided intimacy and affiliation with others so he could keep on with his life without anyone hurting him emotionally. However, partway through the film, he met Skylar. She was different than other girls he had dated, and, when it started to get serious (when she asked him to move with her), he wigged. She cried, he yelled, and he acted like it was no big deal when talking to Robin Williams about it briefly. His need for intimacy is overpowered by the distance he places between himself and all other people.
Another very important aspect of the movie was the friendship between Ben Affleck and Matt Damon. They were knock-around buddies who had known each other forever. Ben's character knew that Will had intelligence and should use it to get out of their town and make a great life for himself. He said he owed it to all of those who didn't have such resources. Will had the competence to succeed in many academic areas and was intrinsically motivated to learn just because he liked it, but he stayed where he was because he was getting his need for relatedness met by his friends. As Sean said, they were so loyal that they would take a bullet for him, and that's why Will "wasted" his time with them. Will felt comfortable with his life there, and he didn't want to change it.
His relationships with Sean, Skylar, and Chuckie shaped him in different ways, but all urged him to head west at the end and "see about a girl." Chuckie told him that if he was still in their town doing the same stuff in twenty years, he'd kill him. Sean urged him to do what was in his heart and make himself happy. Skylar was an unparalleled presence in his life whose brief hiatus made him unhappy. He first "followed his heart" by taking one of the high-level math jobs, but then he realized that it was the girl he really wanted and the intimacy he really needed in order to be happy.
Terms: Autonomy, psychological need, intimacy, relatedness, competence, intrinsic motivation, affiliation.
Good Will Hunting is about Will Hunting, a 20-year-old orphan Harvard janitor who is extremely intelligent and solves a very complex math problem that professors had been working on for years. Hunting, however, has no desire whatsoever to put his extraordinary abilities to any use and is very resistant of attempts of a Harvard professor and many psychologists to get him “on the right track” when he is mandated to meet with them as an alternative to jail time after getting arrested. There are many different examples of motivation and emotion concepts within the film including competence, autonomy and power, as well as relatedness and intimacy.
Will has a very low need for competence, which is defined in our textbook as the need to interact effectively with the environment. He clearly has a unique ability to almost instantly solve problems that have stumped most people for years. Although will is very intellectually gifted, he has chosen a career path of being a janitor instead of challenging himself by getting a job that would actually test his capabilities. It seems as though he sees his talent as a joke because about an hour and a half into the movie, there is a scene where Will lights sheets of paper on which he has solved a difficult problem on fire. The math professor he meets with weekly wishes that Will had a stronger desire for competence because he believes that Will has the potential to make a huge impact with his gift.
Will seems to have a high need for autonomy and power as he seems to do whatever he can think of to control his appointments with the first psychologist and the hypnotist, driving them away from wanting to help him. Will does not like being told what to do at all and only attends his weekly meetings with the math professor and therapists in order to avoid having to go to jail. In the beginning of the movie, there is a scene where Will’s friend is getting bullied by a Harvard student at a bar. Will gains power of the situation when he cuts in and uses his knowledge to make the Harvard student look dumb to save his friend from embarrassment. He also tries to keep control his relationships by pushing people away before they can get a chance to hurt him as he did with Skylar, his girlfriend, when he told her he didn’t love her.
The most obvious examples of psychological needs throughout the film are relatedness, affiliation, and intimacy. At the beginning of the movie, Will makes jokes out of his first therapy and hypnotist appointments, blocking them from gaining intimacy with Will. Throughout the film, Will is shown dating Skylar, and although he obviously really likes her and they are physically intimate, he prevents her from getting too emotionally intimate with him when he lies about his past and tells her that he doesn’t love her when she asks him to move to California with her. Although Will has some intimacy issues, it is clear that relatedness is satisfied with his best friend who cares about him a lot and tells him he has to do better for himself than be a construction worker for the rest of his life. His friends even buy him a car for his 21st birthday, proving that their friendship is communal. At the end of the movie, Will gets over his intimacy issues when he has a breakthrough with his psychologist and recognizes that his abusive past wasn’t his fault. The movie closes with Will leaving to find Skylar, showing that he is ready to move forward with his level of emotional intimacy with her.
Terms: psychological needs, competence, autonomy, power, relatedness, intimacy
Good Will Hunting is a movie about an individual, Will, who is very intelligent and chooses to live an ordinary life. After completing a very difficult mathematical problem left on a blackboard while working as a janitor, Will is discovered and pursued by an award winning math professor, Gerald Lambeau. During this time he interacts with a psychologist, Sean, at the request of a judge following an assault arrest. While working with Professor Lambeau and Sean, Will is also in the midst of a relationship with a girl at Harvard, Skylar. Due to Will’s potential he is constantly influenced to achieve more than what he is choosing to achieve by the professor, psychologist, friends, and girlfriend. An important key in understanding Will’s choice is to discuss his need for autonomy, competence, relatedness, and his feelings towards achievement, affiliation, intimacy, and power. Every person holds a different combination of each of these characteristics, and by being aware of their influence then choices can be much more easily understood. After all, the study of motivation always asks, “what causes behavior”. Focusing on how Will is encouraged to use his potential will answer that question for this character.
Why would anyone choose to essentially ignore an outstanding ability? A question might be a better way to respond to this question stated above. What would we get out of advertising and using our outstanding ability? In reference to Will, it may be helpful to identify what intrinsic and extrinsic motivations he has for utilizing his intelligence. Intrinsic motivation, or personal beliefs about what one should do, is stunted in Will. It is apparent that Will does not believe in his success by listening to him talk in therapy. While in therapy Will usually says something hurtful or mean when confronted about his own potential and capabilities. This shows that Will is uncomfortable with looking inward on himself, therefore he may have limited internal motivation to accomplish anything. If Will is unable to understand his own potential, then it is safe for him to assume that it is not very much. The reason why Will accepts menial jobs may be because he does not believe that using his skills will get him anywhere and therefore does not set his challenges high.
In addition, extrinsic motivation exists in Will’s world. However, Will is content with minimal extrinsic motivators like money, attention, and approval. When will takes a job as a janitor or construction worker, he is accepting low pay, low recognition, and low incentives. Will is willing to accept all these low levels of extrinsic motivation and if he realizes he could collect higher amounts of these, he does not lead on. Only when Will’s friend Chuckie told him that if he did not achieve what his potential allowed him to, he would be a disappointment, did Will choose to pursue higher employment options. Due to prolonged acceptance of minimal extrinsic motivation and higher value given to friend’s perceptions of him Will most likely values friendships over money, position, or power.
Depending on the degree of needs like autonomy, competence, and relatedness different choices can be made. For Will, autonomy seems to be a high need for him. When professor Lambeau encourages Will to engage in educated discussion and interviews Will took the suggestion lightly because it was not Will choice to do those things. Volition, or Will’s willingness to engage in those activities on his own was very low. Prestige and achievement were unimportant characteristics for Will. This may be why he sent in his friend as himself for an interview he did not want to attend. Will did not experience any perceived choice but instead obligation to follow through with the professor’s suggestions. Thus, the professor provided a controlling approach to working with Will, where as Sean was providing a more autonomy-supportive style in counseling sessions. Sean allowed Will to talk freely and focus on what he really wanted for himself.
Will felt that he was pretty competent in every area. A great example of this is when he battled with a guy in the bar using his knowledge and intelligence. In this instance Will did not fear failure, he presented his competence with pride. His opponent was intelligent as well and therefore this battle provided Will flow; a moment when the activity was not boring or too difficult. Since Will was in a flow state, he was able to beat his opponent and present to others a successful outcome due to his intelligence.
The win over the intellectual battle allowed him to receive the phone number of a love interest, Skylar. Not only did Will represent his competence but also used his intelligent to feed his need for relatedness. This lead to a blossoming and close relationship. However, even though people do not usually want to lose close relationships, Will broke up with Skylar when he was asked to share information he did not feel comfortable sharing (about his abusive childhood). However, due to the autonomy-supportive style of his therapist Will was able to work through his past and realized that he indeed did not want to lose this close connection with Skylar. In the end, Will’s need for relatedness overpowered any other need when he left behind a job offer, friends, and therapy to find Skylar in California.
One area to really focus on with Will is the fact that he has a very low achievement need. This is apparent by the fact that his standard of excellence for himself was very low. Will said more than once that hard work was a value of his and he felt it gave him what he needed to be happy, beyond this he did not expect any sort of greatness. Will did not challenge himself with any mastery techniques, he simply had read a lot as a young orphan and was able to remember things incredibly well. This advantage did not appear to be useful to him in his daily life. However, because Will did not use his intelligence it could be said he was afraid to fail or afraid that he would lose some of his personal values in doing so. Overall, people who do live in a world of being afraid of the next step generally are subject to more negative life experiences such as low satisfaction with life, low self-esteem, and much lower wellbeing.
What may have saved Will from all this negativity was his high need for affiliation. Will was close to four friends who respected who he wanted to be day in and day out and did not question him. They treated him like a person instead of a person with high ability. When he met Skylar, even though she knew he was very smart, she also treated him in a human way and did not pressure him into being something he did not set out to be. After working through therapy, Will was able to face some of his past struggles and was able to become intimate with Skylar. Without moving past difficult times in his life that cause attachment difficulties, this would not have been possible. When Will traveled out to California at the end of the movie it was because he wanted to experience that close, meaningful relationship with another person.
Finally, it is obvious that Will also lacked a need for power. Due to his values Will did not seek out positions of leadership, did not seek to be influential, and was not one for low affiliation. However, there were areas that power did settle in his life. Will was a leader in the fact that he always stood up for the underprivileged or those being picked on. This usually pushed him into fistfights, which is why he had such a long wrap sheet. In addition, Will usually exerted his power in therapy by steering the conversation away to himself and onto the therapist. Will found out by doing this he could be saved from the difficult task of getting to know himself. However, when he did finally let go of that power, he was able to move on past his abuse and move forward into intimate growth with another person, Skylar.
Each need and quality mentioned autonomy, competence, relatedness, and achievement, affiliation, intimacy, and power, changed Will’s choices in his life. It was only until an open therapist and supportive friends helped him open his eyes to his potentials did he actually accept them. Due to Will’s intelligence he was constantly being influenced to achieve more than what he was choosing to achieve, and in the end he was able to move forward willingly. The most important word to focus on is “willingly”, because even though everybody may see a bright mind, the only opinion that matters is that person’s.
ME Terms: intrinsic motivation, extrinsic motivation, autonomy, volition, perceived choice, controlling approach, autonomy-supportive motivating style, competence, optimal challenge, flow, relatedness, achievement, mastery, high expectations, value of hard work, life satisfaction, well-being, affiliation, intimacy, power, leadership, influential positions, low affiliation
Will doesn’t seek to challenge himself. He answers near to impossible math equations on the college chalkboard but tries to hide that it’s him. He has intrinsic motivation to fill the satisfaction of completing the problem but not to take credit for it. An extrinsic motivator for him would be working with the Professor who supplies him with job opportunities and hope of a bright future but Will never follows through on the job interviews. These are very high extrinsic motivators but he doesn’t want to accept them. Incentives are something in our lives that attract or repel a certain behavior. Will’s experience of being an orphan taught him not to trust people and that’s why whenever he went to a therapist he made it out to be a joke. The incentive of help from the Professor attracted him to learn and simply just to stay out of jail, but his past taught him not to expect much in fear of being let down yet again.
Will has never had a structured life so when the occasion arises for a good job and prospective future he makes excuses to turn them down. Some of Will’s quasi-needs are to get a job at the college as a janitor to make money. This leads him to strive to achieve a goal of solving the mathematical problems on the chalkboard that only a few people in the world can actually solve.
Will has a low need for achievement. He’s content with working construction even though he has a genius IQ level. He is set up with amazing job opportunities from the Professor but has no desire to even attend the interviews. When it comes to his need for intimacy and affiliation he has a low need also. He has a select group of friend that he associates with and has no desire to make more friends. He even starts dating a girl but when it gets serious he purposely screws it up because of his past history of always being let down by those he cared about. Power is not a strong motivator for Will. He doesn’t have any desire to be in charge or a position of power. He has a low need to have an impact on others, gain control of situations, or to influence others so he has the upper hand. Will hasn’t set any goals for his life. His friends now that he can do great things with his intelligence but because he has a low need for achievement and power he doesn’t even want to consider it. Sean is the only person that can break through to Will and convince him to consider the possibilities for his future and even to pursue an intimate relationship with Skylar.
ME Terms: Power, Affiliation/Intimacy, Quasi-needs, low level need, intrinsic motivation, extrinsic motivation, incentives, structure