Let’s Talk about Motivation
I bet many of you have taken Dr. Koestner’s class about human motivation. (If you have not, I strongly suggest you to take it!) His course has three big components: How to achieve what you want to achieve, how to become an expert, and how to motivate others to become experts.
What really interested me about the topic of human motivation is the difference between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. Intrinsic motivation is the innate interest of doing the task itself — you simply enjoy doing it, and no reward is needed; whereas extrinsic motivation is that you are doing the work trying to obtain something you really want, e.g., promotion, salary bonus, etc.
The lay people knowledge of motivation is simply reward and punishment, i.e., you get more of the desired behaviors when you reward the person, and get less of it when you punish. In the real world settings, most businesses still believe that the best way to motivate its employees is through all kinds of compensation packages — the more you work, the more rewards you get.
However, business once again did not follow the results of tons of scientific literature; and psychology once again proved itself is not common sense. What’s found is that people are actually willing to work longer time with better performance when their intrinsic needs are met instead of extrinsic needs. Also, in fact, when you put too much extrinsic rewards on the person, performance and willpower actually DECREASE. People may work harder and longer at the beginning, but will eventually lose interest in doing the job. (All these apply only to heuristic works, i.e., involve creativity, but do not apply to algorithmic works, i.e., only need to follow a routine; extrinsic rewards actually can increase the productivity of people doing algorithmic works).
Now, you may be interested in how do researchers test motivation level. There are many questionnaires designed to test motivation under different settings: Employee motivation questionnaire, self-regulation questionnaire, engagement questionnaire, etc. However, the most paradigms that psychologists used are experimental paradigms. For example, Ed Deci used Soma paradigm, which measures how much time people play with the soma game with and without rewards. Another example would be double-blind experiment of rating the creativity of paintings by artists when with commission and without commission. (The result is that paintings that were painted without commission were rated much more creative by experts).
Human motivation is a fascinating area of study with tons of implications, and once again I would suggest you to take Dr. Koestner’s class if you haven’t!
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