Category: Motivation

A simple motivational tip that helps you reach exercise goals.

People focusing on losing a reward rather than gaining it are more motivated to exercise, a study finds.

The research shows that exactly the same financial rewards can produce markedly different levels of motivation when framed in different ways.

Professor Kevin G. Volpp, one of the study’s authors, said:

“Our findings demonstrate that the potential of losing a reward is a more powerful motivator and adds important knowledge to our understanding of how to use financial incentives to encourage employee participation in wellness programs.”

The study compared workplace rewards for physical activity.

Some people in the program were given $42 and then had $1.40 taken away for each day they didn’t exercise.

Others were told they would simply receive $1.40 for each day they exercised.

Both of these were compared with a control group.

Financially, it amounted to exactly the same thing, but the first framing emphasises a loss of money and the second framing emphasises the reward.

Fascinatingly, the reward-framing had no effect over and above offering no reward for exercise.

However, the loss-framed incentive increased by 50% the amount of times people reached their exercising goals compared with the control group and the reward-framed incentive.

The study was published in the journal Annals of Internal Medicine (Patel et al., 2016).

How to increase goal commitment and performance.

To motivate yourself to achieve a goal, tell someone about it whose opinion you value, research suggests.

People who share their goal with someone they respect have higher goal commitment and performance.

The reason is that we don’t want to let that person down, or feel we have disappointed them.

In contrast, telling someone of lower status, or keeping a goal secret was not as effective.

Professor Howard Klein, the study’s first author, said:

“Contrary to what you may have heard, in most cases you get more benefit from sharing your goal than if you don’t — as long as you share it with someone whose opinion you value.

You don’t want them to think less of you because you didn’t attain your goal.”

The conclusions come from a series of studies that tested the effect on motivation of revealing goals to others.

They repeatedly showed that it really matters who we share our goals with.

The more people cared about the opinion of the person they shared their goal with, the more motivation they demonstrated.

Professor Klein explained:

“If you don’t care about the opinion of whom you tell, it doesn’t affect your desire to persist — which is really what goal commitment is all about.

You want to be dedicated and unwilling to give up on your goal, which is more likely when you share that goal with someone you look up to.”

Of course, it is always possible to put too much pressure on yourself, Professor Klein said:

“We didn’t find it in this study, but it is possible that you may create so much anxiety in trying to impress someone that it could interfere with your performance.”

The study was published in the Journal of Applied Psychology (Klein et al., 2019).

Motivation can stay at maximum all day long, research finds.

The key to keeping your motivation at maximum is switching tasks, research finds.

Most people’s motivation and performance starts to dip after doing a difficult task for around 30 minutes.

As people get closer to one hour on a task, there is very noticeable drop in performance.

However, if people switch tasks, their self-control is less limited than many believe.

Dr Dan Randles, the study’s first author, said:

“While people get tired doing one specific task over a period of time, we found no evidence that they had less motivation or ability to complete tasks throughout the day.”

Self-control means doing a task that doesn’t reward you immediately, Dr Randles said:

“It’s doing something not because you enjoy it, but because it’s connected to a larger goal and you want to see it through.”

The conclusions come from a study in which over 16,000 people were given a difficult memory task to do at different times of day.

The results showed that people had the same motivation throughout the day.

Psychologists have generally thought that motivation decreases over the day as people’s self-control wears down or is exhausted.

Dr Randles said:

“This doesn’t mean all studies on self-control are wrong, but at least for that one, attempts to replicate it have found no evidence for the effect.

Our results are consistent with theories showing that people lose motivation within a specific task, but at odds with theories that argue self-control is general resource that can be exhausted.”

Dr Iain Harlow, study co-author, thinks the research shows why short, effortful bursts can be so effective in cementing learning:

“This finding is especially important for intellectually demanding tasks like learning.

It fits with research showing that you remember more of what you learn when you review it frequently but in short bursts.”

Dr Randles concluded:

“The fact participants got worse at a single task speaks to how effortful they found it, and despite the difficulty, we found no evidence whatsoever that their ability or motivation decreased up until the point they got tired late at night.”

The study was published in the journal PLOS ONE (Randles et al., 2017).

You can get successfully motivated by envy as long as you use the right type of envy.

I’ve recently written about two really important aspects of mental life: how to reach goals and how to control yourself.

You won’t need telling that both of these are easier said than done.

Part of the reason it’s so difficult to reach long-term goals is because there always seem to be more reasons to give up than there are to go on: fear of failure, lack of time or money and so on.

When you hear successful people talking about their early days there’s one element of their story that’s usually the same.

I heard Renzo Rosso, the founder of the fashion label Diesel, talking about it the other day.

But it could just as easily have been any other business owner, artist or scientist.

What Rosso talked about was how difficult it was in the early days and how many times he cried when things went against him.

And yet he carried on building up a business which is now worth billions.

It isn’t really news that things were difficult in the early days—all new enterprises are like that—what we really want to know is why did he carry on?

How is it that the successful motivate themselves to keep at it when others fall by the wayside?

Talent, skill and luck play a part, but there is more.

Motivated by envy

One story that’s often told is about heroes.

The successful say they were inspired by the achievements of others.

Rosso, for example, talks about his admiration for Armani.

Apparently it’s admiration that drives people through the many dark nights of the soul that come before success.

There’s an element of truth to this but it’s not the whole truth.

According to the philosopher Kierkegaard, admiration for someone is like admitting defeat.

When you truly admire what someone has created, you implicitly admit that you will never be able to reach that standard yourself.

This might sound nonsensical but there’s some psychological validity to it, as explained in a new paper by van de Ven et al. (2011).

They argue that being envious of another’s achievements is painful.

To avoid that pain we translate envy into admiration. In other words: we admit defeat.

The other person’s achievements are beyond us; we must resign ourselves to being inferior.

Unfortunately once we’ve translated envy into admiration, we lose the motivational power of that envy.

Of course there’s a good reason to defuse envy: it’s destructive; it can both make people unhappy in themselves and it can drive them to destroy the object of their envy.

Malicious envy and benign envy

This leaves us with a problem.

The first choice is to give in but feel good.

The second choice is not to give in but to have the emotion eat us up inside and perhaps inspire us to destructive actions.

Is there a third choice? Perhaps there is.

Psychologists have suggested there are two types of envy: malicious envy and benign envy (van den Ven et al., 2009).

We tend to feel malicious envy towards another person if we think their success is undeserved.

This is the type that makes us want to strike out at the other person and bring them down a peg or two.

However when another’s success feels deserved to us, we tend to feel a benign envy: one that isn’t destructive but instead motivates.

It was these two types of envy that were experimentally tested by van de Ven et al. (2011).

They found that benign envy was a powerful motivating force.

Benign envy encouraged people to perform better on measures of intelligence and creativity, when compared with both admiration and malicious envy.

So it seems there is a way out of the envy dilemma.

When we feel benign envy towards another, this social comparison can provide a motivating force, pulling us on.

Our heroes may well motivate us, then, as long as we don’t just admire them but are benignly envious.

Choose the right hero

There is another little twist to the story, though, and it’s a crucial one.

Quite often the heroes or role-models that people choose are way out of their league.

They choose people whose achievements are so great that they’re almost impossible to emulate, like Albert Einstein or Martin Luther King.

The problem is that when we feel someone else’s accomplishments are out of our league, it can be demotivating.

Van de Ven et al. found that people who felt they had little control over their ability to improve resorted to admiration.

On the other hand, those who thought they could improve experienced benign envy and were motivated to work harder.

It’s the feeling of control that motivates.

At the heart of this whole discussion are social comparisons.

When we see someone who is richer, better looking, more intelligent or more successful than us it provokes a whole series of emotions.

Seeing as there’s always someone who fits this description, how we deal with these emotions is vital.

Admiration, though, while a laudable reaction, is less likely to spur us on than a solid dose of benign envy.

Of course most people aren’t going to admit they use envy to motivate themselves, after all, it’s one of the seven deadly sins.

Nevertheless this research suggests that benign envy, if used in the right way, can be a powerful motivating force.

.

Types of motivation, how to stay motivated and the biggest myth about motivation.

Motivation is what causes animals to start or stop doing something.

People generally use the term motivation to describe ‘why’ people do things.

However, people have all sorts of motivational states in their minds — many of which are not put into action.

For most people, the things we are motivated to do, but resist, probably far outweigh the things we end up doing.

So, motivation is not just about action or inaction, it is also about competing mental states.

Psychologists have put forward all sorts of theories about why people do things, including drive theory, instinct theory and humanistic theory.

The truth, though, is that people’s motivation is difficult to assess, partly because so much of it is unconscious.

Types of motivation

One useful distinction, though, in motivation, is between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation.

For human beings, roughly speaking there are only two reasons to do anything in life:

1. Because you want to: known to psychologists as intrinsic motivation.
2. Because someone else wants you to: what psychologists call extrinsic motivation.

The first category of internally motivated activities might include things like eating, socialising, hobbies and going on holiday.

The second category of externally motivated activities might include working a job, studying, or loading the dishwasher.

The reason I say ‘roughly speaking’ and ‘might include’ is because the two types of motivation can be difficult to disentangle.

Yes, you enjoy your work, but would you do it for less money or for free?

Maybe, maybe not.

Yes, my wife wants me to load the dishwasher, but maybe I’d do it anyway.

Or maybe not.

Turning work into play

One type of motivation can slowly morph into another over time.

For example, things originally we did for their own sake can become a chore once we are paid for them.

More hearteningly, sometimes things we once did just for the money can become intrinsically motivated.

This latter, magical transformation is most fascinating and probably happens because the activity satisfies one or all of three basic human needs.

As the eminent motivation researchers, Richard M. Ryan and Edward L. Deci, say, it’s these three factors that are at the core of intrinsic motivation (Ryan & Deci, 2000):

1. Competence. We want to be good at something. Things that are too easy, though, don’t give us a sense of competence; it has to be just hard enough.
2. Autonomy. We want to be free and dislike being controlled. When people have some freedom—even within certain non-negotiable boundaries—they are more likely to thrive.
3. Relatedness. As social animals we want to feel connected to other people.

Look for these in any activity if you want to harness the power of self-guiding, internal motivation.

How to stay motivated

Completing a long-term project takes different types of motivation as time passes.

Studies find that people motivate themselves in different ways depending on where they are in pursuing a goal (Bullard & Manchanda, 2017).

At the start, people motivate themselves with hopes and dreams of reaching their goal.

For example, someone wanting to lose weight might think about the clothes they will be able to wear.

Psychologists call this ‘promotion motivation’ as the study’s authors explain:

“Promotion motivation encourages people to focus on hopes and aspirations, it makes people think of their goals in terms of attainment of something positive, and it leads individuals to favor approach-oriented “eager” strategies in goal pursuit.”

Some tips to help you get motivated at the start of a project include:

• Reward yourself for taking the first steps.
• Note some positive things you will gain from completing the project.

However, as people get closer to their goal, they get more defensive.

Psychologically, it becomes less about the benefits and more about avoiding a slip-up:

“…prevention motivation encourages people to focus on responsibilities and duties, it makes people think of their goals in terms of avoiding something negative, and it leads individuals to favor avoidance-oriented “vigilant” strategies in goal pursuit.”

Some tips to help you get motivated as the end of the project nears:

• List problems to avoid.
• Write down the barriers to completing the goal.
• Give yourself a break if things get too hard.
• Focus on your duty to finish the project and why it is so important.

Tips for increasing motivation

Many people are looking for ways to increase their motivation and psychologists have done a lot of research in this area.

Here are some common ways studies have found motivation can be boosted.

1. Use the stick for motivation

To change people’s behaviour, the stick beats the carrot, but it only needs to be a small stick, research finds (Kubanek et al., 2015).

The study compared the effects of punishments (stick) with rewards (carrot) to see which worked best.

The psychologists found the influence of punishments outweighed rewards by two or three times.

Bear in mind, though, that continuous negative feedback has all sorts of other effects so it should be used sparingly.

2. Switch tasks to recover motivation

Most people’s motivation and performance starts to dip after doing a difficult task for around 30 minutes (Randles et al., 2017).

As people get closer to one hour on a task, there is very noticeable drop in performance.

However, if people switch tasks, their self-control is less limited than many believe.

This is why short, effortful bursts can be so effective.

3. Use self-talk for motivation

Thinking “I can do better” really can help improve performance (Lane et al., 2016).

Self-talk like this increases the intensity of effort people make and even makes them feel happier as well.

The study compared the motivational power of self-talk, such as “I will do better” with imagery and if-then planning.

Imagery involved imagining doing better and if-then planning is making a plan to act in a certain way.

All three techniques improved performance, but self-talk was consistently the most powerful.

4. Create backup plans

Backup plans are a useful way of driving you forward at the precarious early stages of a project.

That’s because our motivation to succeed is heavily tied in with our expectations of success.

No one drives to a shop that they are pretty sure is closed.

What feeds our motivation is knowing that we have a good chance of achieving the goal.

A little more time spent thinking about a backup plan or alternative ways to get where you’re going will help you, even if you never have to actually use them (Huang & Zhang, 2013).

However, backup plans do not work as well when a project is well underway.

Towards the end, backup plans should be reduced to avoid distraction.

5. Use fear

Fear can be used as an excellent motivator for exercise, research finds (Sobh & Martin, 2007).

When people imagine themselves getting fat and unattractive, they are more motivated to work out.

Fear seems to work particularly well when people are failing at their goals.

In the study, fear motivated 85 percent to continue with their gym programme when they were failing.

The biggest myth about motivation

One of the single biggest myths about motivation that most people firmly believe is that cash incentives increase motivation.

If you want the job done well, offer a bonus — or so the common belief goes.

In fact, psychological research often shows the opposite (Murayama et al., 2016).

When psychologists test the effects of using rewards, they find something strange.

People are indeed motivated by rewards in the short-term.

But, in the long-term rewards actually undermine motivation.

Dr Kou Murayama, first author of a study, said:

“Society has a deep-rooted misunderstanding of how motivation works, and employers are repeatedly shooting themselves in the foot with the frequent use of rewards to encourage certain behaviours or increase effort.

Our work shows we need to correct our strong misbelief in a carrot and stick approach to achieve sustained motivation among workers.”

The study involved people playing a game — some were offered rewards to play again, others not.

Almost two-thirds of people agreed that incentives would motivate people.

Actually the reverse was true: rewards demotivated people.

The reasons seemed to be that:

• People’s autonomy is undermined by rewards. In other words they think if they are being paid to do something, they don’t really want to do it for its own sake.
• People focus more on the reward than actually doing the job.

Instead of rewards, it is better to focus on internal motivation and people’s personal autonomy should be respected.

SMART goals should be Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-bound, but beware these four common pitfalls.

It’s no accident that goal-setting pervades so many areas of modern life.

There are hundreds of research studies going back decades showing that setting goals can increase people’s performance.

What are SMART goals?

Many people have heard the goal-setting mantra that goals should be S.M.A.R.T:

• Specific: what actions will you need to take and what will be accomplished?
• Measurable: how can you tell if the job is done?
• Achievable/Attainable: are the necessary skills and resources available for the task?
• Realistic/Relevant: can the goal be achieved and does it align with broader goals?
• Time-bound: when should the goal be achieved by?

Despite this, few recognise the dangers of setting poor SMART goals and the unintended consequences that can follow.

Here’s how to avoid four common problems with setting SMART goals, which are highlighted by Ordonez et al. (2009) at the Harvard Business School.

1. Over-specific SMART goals

The problem with setting SMART goals that are too specific is that they can bias people’s behaviour in unintended ways.

For example:

• If you use goals to effectively tell a university professor that all that’s important is publishing articles, then what is going to happen to her teaching?
• If you tell call-centre staff that the main thing is how quickly they answer the phone, what’s going to happen to how they deal with the call?

Very specific SMART goals can degrade overall performance by warping the way people view their jobs.

Better SMART goals: keep them somewhat vague. This gives people control and choice over how they do their jobs.

When people are given vaguer goals they can take into account more factors: in short it makes them think for themselves.

It’s no wonder that having control is strongly linked with job satisfaction.

2. Too many SMART goals

Perhaps the answer, then, is to set loads of goals which cover all aspects of a person’s work?

Not necessarily, as that introduces its own problems.

For one thing people tend to concentrate on the easiest goal to the exclusion of the others.

For example, in one study participants were given both quality and quantity goals related to a task.

When quantity goals were easier to achieve than quality, they focused mostly on quantity.

This study is showing how a well-meaning goal can warp people’s behaviour in unintended directions.

Better SMART goals: limit the total number of goals.

Apart from anything else, who can remember 10 or 20 goals they are supposed to be working towards?

3. Short-termism

Why is it so hard to get a cab on a rainy day?

The answer isn’t just that more people are hailing cabs; it’s also that the cab drivers go home earlier because they hit their targets earlier for the day.

So Camerer et al., (1997) found in their study of New York cab drivers.

This is a prime example of short-termism: SMART goals can make people believe that when they hit their target, they can take the rest of the day (or month!) off.

This works at an organisational level as well: if an organisation is continually working to meet short-term SMART goals, it can neglect the long-term importance of innovation and evolution.

Better SMART goals: Make sure short-term SMART goals don’t interfere with the long-term vision, otherwise they can be corrosive for the organisation.

4. Too hard

When SMART goals are too hard, they encourage people to do anything in order to meet them; that includes unethical behaviour.

One example of unethical behaviour prompted by poor goals was in the hard disk manufacturer, MiniScribe.

Back in 1989, in order to meet financial targets, they began shipping bricks instead of hard drives.

The bricks sat unopened for a few weeks in a Singapore warehouse, while Miniscribe successfully invoiced for them.

The company soon went into bankruptcy.

Miniscribe’s story is also a brilliant example of short-term thinking.

What did they think was going to happen when the bricks were discovered, as they surely would be?

Similarly, research has also shown that when people are set more difficult SMART goals, they are more willing to take risks.

In some circumstances this may be acceptable, but often it is not.

Not only that, but SMART goals that are too hard are simply demotivating.

How come almost reaching your target feels like failure, even when you’re 99 percent there?

Better smart goals: Set genuinely achievable goals rather than so-called ‘stretch’ goals.

These will avoid encouraging people to behave unethically.

New rules for setting SMART goals

All of these problems are further exaggerated by larger the incentives.

When there are huge amounts of money at stake, then badly set goals can distort human behaviour even more.

So, use these warnings as ways to set better SMART goals, and be careful of unintended consequences.

Ordonez et al. (2009) conclude by saying:

“Rather than dispensing goal setting as a benign, over-the-counter treatment for students of management, experts need to conceptualize goal setting as a prescription-strength medication that requires careful dosing, consideration of harmful side effects, and close supervision.”

With that warning in mind, here are some new rules of SMART goals:

• Goals should be somewhat abstract.
• Goals should be set with an eye on the long-term.
• Goals should be relatively limited in number.
• Goals should not be too hard to achieve.

(Oh, and unless they’ve ordered them, never ship bricks.)

.

Visualisation can be a powerful tool for achieving goals, but it must be done in the right way to avoid the planning fallacy.

There are some wild claims out there for the power of visualisation.

Things like: if you can imagine it, then it will come to you.

Of course there’s always been a huge market for telling people things they want to hear, even if it’s complete rubbish.

Still, visualisation can certainly be important in reaching goals and in other areas.

Visualisation examples

Much research has been conducted in athletics which shows the power of visualisation.

Athletes are encouraged to experience their sporting behaviour in advance to enhance their performance.

There is now hardly a sport left that doesn’t have psychologists telling players to visualise their performance.

Visualisation is also used in psychological therapies to help people change their behaviour.

For example, a simple visualisation technique can help reduce the symptoms of depression.

In one study, people were taught to use visualisation to transform aspects of their daily life, such as memories of traumatic events, goal attainment and social interaction (Velikova et al., 2017).

Traumatic events, for example, are repeatedly visualised with a happy ending.

People looking to achieve goals are encouraged to think about the steps leading to those goals and then visualise successfully going through them.

To improve social interactions, people visualised feeling mentally calm and fresh on the next day.

Similarly alcoholics are sometimes told to visualise how they will deal with situations in which they’re tempted to drink.

Visualisation to discover passions

Visualising activities done in the past can help people find their true passion, one study finds (Niese et al., 2019).

However, it is critical to do this visualisation in the first person to avoid biases.

When thinking back, it is important to imagine what you saw, heard, felt and thought from your own perspective.

The key is to re-think, re-feel and re-hear exactly what you previously experienced.

Only then can you get a clue to your true passions.

Effective visualisation

So, we know that visualisations can be effective in helping us reach goals.

But visions about the future come in many different forms.

How do we know we’re performing the right sort of visualisation?

Popular self-help books would have us believe that mentally simulating the outcome will help us achieve it.

So if we imagine ourselves getting that promotion, meeting the partner of our dreams or just giving the house a spring clean, it will make us more likely to achieve our goal.

We’ve already seen the dangers of fantasising about future success.

But perhaps a more effective way of visualising the future is to think about the processes that are involved in reaching a goal, rather than just the end-state of achieving it.

Process versus outcome

Outcome and process have been put head-to-head experimentally by Pham and Taylor (1999) who had students either visualise their ultimate goal of doing well in an exam or the steps they would take to reach that goal, i.e.  studying.

The results were clear-cut.

Participants who visualised themselves reading and gaining the required skills and knowledge, spent longer actually studying and got better grades in the exam.

Interestingly, though, the relationship generally found between time spent studying and good grades is surprisingly weak.

There were two reasons the visualising the process worked:

• Planning: visualising the process helped focus attention on the steps needed to reach the goal.
• Emotion: process visualisation led to reduced anxiety.

The planning fallacy

One of the reasons just visualising an outcome doesn’t work is the planning fallacy.

The planning fallacy is our completely normal assumption that everything will be much easier than it really will be.

The planning fallacy still strikes people, even after years and years of experience.

We continually fail to anticipate just how much of any plan can and will go wrong.

Thinking about the process, though, helps to focus the mind on potential problems and how to overcome them.

Just dreaming about a goal may actually be worse than ineffective, it may reduce our performance.

In the current study participants who just envisioned a successful outcome studied less and actually had reduced motivation.

So, be careful what you wish for.

Instead visualise how you might achieve it to avoid the planning fallacy.

Aphantasia

One word of warning about visualisation.

People vary in their abilities and some people cannot visualise anything at all.

Aphantasia is the condition of having no ‘mind’s eye’, including no ability to visualise (Zeman et al., 2015).

those with aphantasia are unable to mentally summon up sounds, tastes, textures or emotions in their minds.

Aphantasia may affect around 2.5% of people.

Some have the condition from birth, while others acquire it from brain damage of one kind or another.

.

Intrinsic motivation is doing something for the pure pleasure of it, rather than for some external reward, such as money.

Intrinsic motivation, in psychology, refers to the type of motivation that comes from within.

Intrinsic motivation means doing something for its own sake and is often the healthiest and most powerful form of motivation.

In contrast, extrinsic motivation means doing something for an external reward, such as money or esteem.

Psychologists have found that while rewards can drive behaviour, they also have unexpected effects on people’s motivation.

Below are examples of intrinsic motivation, starting with a story about preschool children with much to teach all ages.

It demonstrates why rewards are sometimes not the best way to generate motivation in ourselves and others.

Intrinsic motivation example

Psychologists Mark R. Lepper and David Greene from Stanford University and the University of Michigan were interested in testing the effects of rewards on children (Lepper et al., 1973).

Since parents so often use rewards as motivators for children they recruited fifty-one preschoolers aged between 3 and 4.

All the children selected for the study were interested in drawing.

It was crucial that they already liked drawing because Lepper and Greene wanted to see what effect rewards would have when children were already fond of the activity.

The children were then randomly assigned to one of the following conditions:

1. Expected reward. In this condition children were told they would get a certificate with a gold seal and ribbon if they took part.
2. Surprise reward. In this condition children would receive the same reward as above but, crucially, weren’t told about it until after the drawing activity was finished.
3. No reward. Children in this condition expected no reward, and didn’t receive one.

Each child was invited into a separate room to draw for 6 minutes then afterwards either given their reward or not depending on the condition.

Then, over the next few days, the children were watched through one-way mirrors to see how much they would continue drawing of their own accord.

The results

The graph below shows the percentage of time they spent drawing by experimental condition:

As you can see the expected reward had decreased the amount of spontaneous interest the children took in drawing (and there was no statistically significant difference between the no reward and surprise reward group).

So, those who had previously liked drawing (high intrinsic motivation) were less motivated once they expected to be rewarded for the activity.

In fact the expected reward reduced the amount of spontaneous drawing the children did by half.

Not only this, but judges rated the pictures drawn by the children expecting a reward as less aesthetically pleasing.

The study demonstrates both the dangers of extrinsic motivation and the power of intrinsic motivation.

Rewards can reduce intrinsic motivation

It’s not only children who display this kind of reaction to rewards, though, subsequent studies have shown a similar effect on intrinsic motivation in all sorts of different populations, many of them grown-ups.

In one study, smokers who were rewarded for their efforts to quit did better at first but after three months fared worse than those given no rewards and no feedback (Curry et al., 1990).

Once again, their intrinsic motivation to give up was reduced by rewards.

Indeed those given rewards even lied more about the amount they were smoking.

Reviewing 128 studies on the effects of rewards (Deci et al., 1999) concluded that:

“…tangible rewards tend to have a substantially negative effect on intrinsic motivation (…) Even when tangible rewards are offered as indicators of good performance, they typically decrease intrinsic motivation for interesting activities.”

Rewards have even been found to make people less creative and worse at problem-solving.

Rewards, then, often undermine intrinsic motivation.

Intrinsic motivation vs extrinsic motivation

So, what’s going on?

The key to understanding these behaviours lies in the difference between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation.

When we do something for its own sake, because we enjoy it or because it fills some deep-seated desire, this is intrinsic motivation.

On the other hand when we do something because we receive some reward, like a certificate or money, this is extrinsic motivation.

The overjustification hypothesis

The children in the study above were chosen in the first instance because they already liked drawing and they were already had intrinsic motivation to draw.

It was pleasurable, they were good at it and they got something out of it that fed their souls.

Then, some of them got a reward for drawing and their intrinsic motivation changed.

Before they had been drawing because they enjoyed it, but now it seemed as though they were drawing for the reward.

What had been intrinsic motivation, they were now being given an external, extrinsic motivation for.

This provided too much justification for what they were doing and so, paradoxically, afterwards they drew less.

This is the overjustification hypothesis for which Lepper and Greene were searching and although it seems like backwards thinking, it’s typical of the way the mind sometimes works.

We don’t just work ‘forwards’ from our attitudes and preferences to our actions, we also work ‘backwards’, working out what our attitudes and preferences must be based on our current situation, feelings or actions (see also: cognitive dissonance).

When money makes play into work

Not only this but rewards are dangerous for another reason: because they remind us of obligations, of being made to do things we don’t want to do.

Children are given rewards for eating all their food, doing their homework or tidying their bedrooms.

So, rewards become associated with painful activities that we don’t want to do.

The same goes for grown-ups: money becomes associated with work and work can be dull, tedious and painful.

When we get paid for something we automatically assume that the task is dull, tedious and painful—even when it isn’t.

That is why play can become work when we get paid and intrinsic motivation reduces.

The person who previously enjoyed painting pictures, weaving baskets, playing the cello or pretty much anything else, suddenly finds the task tedious once money has become involved.

Yes, sometimes rewards do work, especially if people really don’t want to do something.

But when tasks are inherently interesting to us rewards can damage our intrinsic motivation by undermining our natural talent for self-regulation.

Improve intrinsic motivation

Since intrinsic motivation is so powerful, it is useful to know how to increase it.

Here are some useful methods to explore for increasing intrinsic motivation for a task:

• In any activity, look for the purely enjoyable aspects of it: reasons you might do it, whether you had to or not.
• Helping others for no reward is often driven by intrinsic motivation. Look for opportunities in this direction.
• Focus on the purpose or values implicit in the task, rather than just completing it mechanically.
• Mastery of a skill, any skill, rather than just getting the job done, tends to breed intrinsic motivation.
• Feeling satisfied with a task is a good sign of intrinsic motivation. Therefore, pay attention to tasks that leave you feeling satisfied.