The SCARF model

From Young Minds Are Undermined by Today's Fashionable Philosophies by Sean Malone. Not so taken by the argument Malone is making but am intrigued by the model he references in making it.

The SCARF Model

In part, I began thinking about this because my colleagues at the Foundation for Economic (FEE) and I have recently started to import some ideas from David Rock's "SCARF" model for the media we produce, and I became curious about how this might apply to society at large.

For those unfamiliar with the idea, “SCARF” is built around the concept that people are constantly seeking to avoid pain and get more rewards for their activities and that most of these behaviors center around five specific motivations (which together make up the acronym "SCARF"):

Status

Certainty

Autonomy

Relatedness

Fairness

For Dr. Rock, who often acts as a management consultant to large corporations, the idea is that by remembering that these are the emotions that motivate employees, managers can better understand how to get top-quality work out of their people.

It makes a lot of sense. If you know that people are often motivated by improving their relative status among their peers, then you know that by offering people public praise, you’re bolstering their sense of pride in their work and helping them achieve their status-seeking goals and, on the flip-side, you know that if you berate them publicly, you’ll be smashing their sense of status among their peers and that embarrassment may ruin their desire to continue working effectively.

The thing about all this is that, as far as we know from neuroscience and psychological studies, these motivations are real, consistent across essentially all people, and somewhat immutable.

To one degree or another, they’re just things that we’re all concerned about. We can’t just wipe these underlying motivations away by wishing they didn’t exist. As a result, we can’t ignore them. Instead, we can either bolster them—giving people the tools to improve their status, gain certainty about the world, gain more control over their lives, feel related to others and build community, and maintain a sense of fairness about their interactions with other people—or we can try to negate them and make people feel worse about themselves.

Business/Psychology churns out a lot of intriguing ideas which are ill-supported by actual evidence but this one looks interesting.