The implications for motivation are vast. Researchers such as Harvard Business School’s Teresa Amabile have found that external rewards and punishments—both carrots and sticks—can work nicely for algorithmic tasks. But they can be devastating for heuristic ones. Those sorts of challenges—solving novel problems or creating something the world didn’t know it was missing—depend heavily on Harlow’s third drive. Amabile calls it the intrinsic motivation principle of creativity, which holds, in part: “Intrinsic motivation is conducive to creativity; controlling extrinsic motivation is detrimental to
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