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This article is based in part on Edwin A. Locke's G. Stanley Hall lectures at the annual meetings of the American Psychological Association in 1999 and of the Southeastern Psychological Association in 2000. It is also based on Gary P. Latham's presidential address to the Canadian Psychological Association in 2001 and on his invited address to the American Psychological Society in 2001. In the 1950s and 1960s, the study of motivation in North American psychology was not considered a respectable pursuit. The field was dominated by behaviorists, and"motivation" was argued by them to lie outside the person in the form of reinforcers and punishers. When internal mechanisms were acknowledged, as in drive reduction theory, it was said that they were primarily physiological.