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Why We Do What We Do: The Variety of Human Regulations
The chapter presents an attempt to answer the basic question of the motivational roots of human activity in terms of varied principles and systems of activity regulation. Regulation is treated as the general principle explaining the capacity of living systems to move from less desirable outcomes to more desirable ones, based on feedback evaluated against the criteria of the desirable and causing corrections of the current activity. Forms of regulation may be of different complexity and subordinated to different kinds of criteria. The author offers a theoretical classification of possible logics of human regulation, each of them being an elementary mechanism; the proposed multiregulation personality model suggests that the whole system of individual autoregulation is made by the combination of the described elementary mechanisms in individually varied proportions that accounts for the qualitative interindividual differences.