Facebook Exploits Our Intrinsic and Extrinsic Motivations
“The will to win, the desire to succeed, the urge to reach your full potential… these are the keys that will unlock the door to personal excellence.” — Confucius
Confucius, an ancient Chinese philosopher, once said, “The will to win, the desire to succeed, the urge to reach your full potential… These are the keys that will unlock the door to personal excellence.” What Confucius is identifying are the traits of intrinsic motivations. What does this have to do with Facebook?
“FACEBOOK EXPLOITS OUR INTRINSIC AND EXTRINSIC MOTIVATIONS.” — Hayden Snook, 2017
In our Social Media course at Juniata College, we were given reading from the book “Cognitive Surplus: How Technology Makes Consumers into Collaborators” by Clay Shirky. In this book, Shirky explains the Soma Experiments. The Soma Experiments were conducted by University of Rochester research psychologist Edward Deci. Deci came up with this experiment through the puzzle game Soma. Soma is a wooden cube game divided into seven smaller pieces. The objective of this game is to figure out how to make as many shapes as possible by looking at a drawing of the shapes on paper (Shirky, 2010). Edward Deci would bring subjects, that were students at the university, and sit them down and have them play the game. He would then say that he was going to step out for a break. The subjects would believe that the experiment itself was just to see how many shapes they would get, almost as if it were an intelligence or problem solving experiment. The truth was that Deci was actually studying the subjects in another room through a double-sided mirror. Deci was looking at the behaviors of the subjects whole given an opportunity to have a break. Deci held three sessions of this experiment. In the first session, Deci had the subjects just do there normal behavior, and Deci found that the majority of the subjects just continued to play with the game and figure out how to form the shapes. In the second session, Deci changed the motivations of the subjects, splitting one half of the subjects into a group where they were told they would be paid a dollar for every shape they made and the other half to the same stipulations of the last experiment. Interestingly, the group that was paid to make shapes, ended up working hard during the break to find more ways to make shapes, in order to make more money, creating an extrinsic motivation. What surprised Deci was that the other group kept up a pace close to the one of the paid group, doing it just because they had the challenge of making the shapes. In the third session, Deci introduced the group of subjects to the same stipulations as the first time, no reward for more shapes. Deci found then that during the “break”, the subjects that were paid in the last session, paid far less attention to the puzzle game compared to the other group that was not paid and kept at the generally same pace as the session before. What Deci found is interesting. “Intrinsic motivations are those in which the activity itself is the reward. In the case of Soma, the subjects who kept working on the puzzle during their break were clearly motivated by the satisfaction that would come from doing so correctly. Extrinsic motivations are those in which the reward for doing something is external to the activity, not the activity itself (Shirky, 2010).” What Deci found is extremely important to marketing a business, website, and especially a social media platform.
So you may be thinking, why in the hell did I just read all of this? What relevance does it have to why Facebook is exploiting my motivation? The answer is simple, what Deci found in his experiments is close to how Facebook continues to have low user-turnover, meaning not many people delete their Facebook profiles. Facebook is utilizing a system that capitalizes on both the intrinsic and extrinsic motivations of a user. In another book we are reading for our course, “The Culture of Connectivity: A Critical History of Social Media” by José Van Dijck, the author expressed that the values of openness and connectedness are explained by one word that is common on Facebook: sharing (Dijck, 2013). Sharing, in all truths, creates an intrinsic motivation for all users. Exploit intrinsic motivation? Check. Sharing gives a jovial feeling to all of us. When we post something, we feel good about it because we are sharing our lives with others and showing them what we do. We are proud of the things we do and heights we conquer. We like to show them off.
This is where this gets interesting, the extrinsic motivation is created by Facebook through knowing that when we post something out of gratitude of ourselves, and we want people to notice. The extrinsic motivation? LIKES, SHARES, COMMENTS. We want our “friends” to know we did something, and whenever us, the users, receive a form of positive feedback created by Facebook, they know we will continue to post. If you look closely at the new like or “reaction” system in February of 2016, they have a minor set of negative reactions. They have the regular like, a love, a laughing (haha), a surprised (wow), a sad, and a angry reaction option. Only two of the six reactions are negative reactions. Also, these negative reactions? The only way you can see them is if you hold down on the like button on your phone or computer, and then move your mouse the whole way over to them or scroll with your finger. It seems obvious to me that Facebook does not want negative reactions on their pages, because the extrinsic motivations are to have a positive experience with your posts.
Although this may seem negative that they are “exploiting” this, we must also realize all the good that happens on Facebook and how we all enjoy posting pictures of things we do, our family, and sharing stories we have. Facebook has created an environment where millions upon millions of people can connect and interact in a generally peaceful way.
The negatives of this exploitation however arises when negative situations are used to receive likes and comments. There have been situations online where young children have posted videos of their moms and dads arguing or fighting, teenagers who film fights they have outside or inside of school to show off to their friends, and even more recently a man who decided to kill a man on Facebook Live because of the attention he would get. Our motivations are what drives us, and as we develop a keenness to the likes on a post, we become addicted to the attention. It feels good to get the attention. To understand more about this “addiction”, watch this video of Simon Sinek explaining this.
References:
Shirky, Clay. Cognitive surplus: how technology makes consumers into collaborators. New York: Penguin , 2010. Print.
Dijck, José Van. The culture of connectivity: a critical history of social media. Oxford: Oxford U Press, 2013. Print.
