The major metaphorical themes in motivation are reviewed and associated with psychological theories and characteristic research. The history of motivation is construed as reflecting two major metaphors: The person is a machine, and the person is Godlike. In addition, a new submetaphor is proposed as directing current thinking in the field: The person is a judge. This comparison supplements the submetaphor guiding attribution theory, namely, the person is a scientist. Both comparisons, the judge and the scientist, are comprised within the more inclusive metaphor of the person as Godlike.
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Bernard Weiner (1991) studied this question.