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November 20, 2016 - July 15, 2020
“Those artists who pursued their painting and sculpture more for the pleasure of the activity itself than for extrinsic rewards have produced art that has been socially recognized as superior,”
“It is those who are least motivated to pursue extrinsic rewards who eve...
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“tolerates early failure, rewards long-term success, and gives its appointees great freedom to experiment.”
But for more right-brain undertakings—those that demand flexible problem-solving, inventiveness, or conceptual understanding—contingent rewards can be dangerous.
Rewarded subjects often have a harder time seeing the periphery and crafting original solutions.
As the economy moves toward more right-brain, conceptual work—as more of us deal with our own versions of the candle problem—this might be the most alarming gap between what science knows and what business does.
It tainted an altruistic act and “crowded out” the intrinsic desire to do something good.
the Italian government gave blood
donors paid time off work, donations increased.
What is true is that mixing rewards with inherently interesting, creative, or noble tasks—deploying them without understanding the peculiar science of motivation—is a very dangerous game.
By neglecting the ingredients of genuine motivation—autonomy, mastery, and purpose—they limit what each of us can achieve.
Goals that people set for themselves and that are devoted to attaining mastery are usually healthy. But goals imposed by others—sales targets, quarterly returns, standardized test scores, and so on—can sometimes have dangerous side effects.
Like all extrinsic motivators, goals narrow our focus.
a narrowed focus exacts a cost. For complex or conceptual tasks, offering a reward can blinker the wide-ranging thinking necessary to...
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“Substantial evidence demonstrates that in addition to motivating constructive effort, goal setting can induce unethical behavior.”
The problem with making an extrinsic reward the only destination that matters is that some people will choose the quickest route there, even if it means taking the low road.
When the reward is the activity itself—deepening learning, delighting customers, doing one’s best—there are no shortcuts.
goals are more toxic than Motivation 2.0 recognizes.
offering a reward, a principal signals to the agent that the task is undesirable.
“Rewards are addictive in that once offered, a contingent reward makes an agent expect it whenever a similar task is faced, which in turn compels the principal to use rewards over and over again.”
And before long, the existing reward may no longer suffice.
It will quickly feel less like a bonus and more like the status quo—which then forces the principal to offer larger r...
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That is, when the participants anticipated getting a reward (but not when they anticipated losing one), a burst of the brain chemical dopamine surged to this part of the brain.
The mechanism of most addictive drugs is to send a fusillade of dopamine to the nucleus accumbens. The feeling delights, then dissipates, then demands another dose. In other words, if we watch how people’s brains respond, promising them monetary rewards and giving them cocaine, nicotine, or amphetamines look disturbingly similar.
Several researchers have found that companies that spend the most time offering guidance on quarterly earnings deliver significantly lower long-term growth rates than companies that offer guidance less frequently.
This is the nature of economic bubbles: What seems to be irrational exuberance is ultimately a bad case of extrinsically motivated myopia.
In environments where extrinsic rewards are most salient, many people work only to the point that triggers the reward—and no further. So if students get a prize for reading three books, many won’t pick up a fourth, let alone embark on a lifetime of reading—just as executives who hit their quarterly numbers often won’t boost earnings a penny more, let alone contemplate the long-term health of their company. Likewise, several studies show that paying people to exercise, stop smoking, or take their medicines produces terrific results at first—but the healthy behavior disappears once the
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undermined.”1 Likewise, when Dan Ariely and his colleagues conducted their Madurai, India, performance study with a group of MIT students, they found that when the task called for “even rudimentary cognitive skill,” a larger reward “led to poorer performance.” But “as long as the task involved only mechanical skill, bonuses worked as they would be expected: the higher the pay, the better the performance.”2
“self-determination theory (SDT).”
We’re keen responders to positive and negative reinforcements, or zippy calculators of our self-interest, or lumpy duffel bags of psychosexual conflicts. SDT, by contrast, begins with a notion of universal human needs. It argues that we have three innate psychological needs—competence, autonomy, and relatedness.
When those needs are satisfied, we’re motivated, productive, and happy. When they’re thwarted, our motivation, productivity, and happiness plummet.1 “If there’s anything [fundamental] about our nature, it’s the capacity for interest. Some things facilitate it. Some things undermine
When people use rewards to motivate, that’s when they’re most demotivating.”
we should focus our efforts on creating environments for our innate psychological needs to flourish.
Human beings have an innate inner drive to be autonomous, self-determined, and connected to one another. And when that drive is liberated, people achieve more and live richer lives.
Type I behavior is fueled more by intrinsic desires than extrinsic ones. It concerns itself less with the external rewards to which an activity leads and more with the inherent satisfaction of the activity itself. At the center of Type X behavior is the second drive. At the center of
The most successful people, the evidence shows, often aren’t directly pursuing conventional notions of success.
They’re working hard and persisting through difficulties because of their internal desire to control their lives, learn about their world, and accomplish something that endures.
people oriented toward autonomy and intrinsic motivation have higher self-esteem, better interpersonal relationships, and greater general well-being than those who are extrinsically motivated.
Type I behavior depends on three nutrients:
autonomy, mastery, and purpose.
Or we can listen to the research, drag our business and personal practices into the twenty-first century, and craft a new operating system to help ourselves, our companies, and our world work a little better.
It works on guerrilla-style side projects in Mountain View, California.
strategy guru Gary Hamel has observed, a technology—and an 1850s technology at that.
But at its core this technology hasn’t changed much in more than a hundred years. Its paramount goal remains compliance, its central ethic remains control, and its chief tools remain extrinsic motivators.
But today economic accomplishment, not to mention personal fulfillment, more often swings on a different hinge. It depends not on keeping our nature submerged but on allowing it to surface.
It requires resisting the temptation to control people—and instead doing everything we can to reawaken their deep-seated sense of autonomy. This innate capacity for self-direction is at the heart of Motivation 3.0 and Type I behavior.
self-determination theory (SDT).
controlled or autonomous. “Autonomous motivation involves behaving with a full sense of volition and choice,” they write, “whereas controlled motivation involves behaving with the experience of pressure and demand toward specific outcomes that comes from forces perceived to be external to the self.”
“The ultimate freedom for creative groups is the freedom to experiment with new ideas. Some skeptics insist that innovation is expensive. In the long run, innovation is cheap. Mediocrity is expensive—and autonomy can be the antidote.”
It means acting with choice—which means we can be both autonomous and happily interdependent with others.
