Thread by @vascobrazao

It's time to retire "intrinsic motivation."

A 4-PART THREAD 🧵

#EduTwitter #MondayMotivation #LifeHacks

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PART 1: INSIDE OUT

You're probably familiar with the story:

✨ Humans are intrinsically motivated to do many things. Meaning that, for a lot of what we do, doing it is its own reward. Think singing in the shower, reading a good book, or learning statistics (for some!).

Enter the villain:

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😈 Extrinsic Rewards.

If your child never sings in the shower, why not offer the promise of ice cream? Money per book read? A chocolate for an equation?

Fool! These rewards might boost motivation in the short-term, but there's a catch! The new motivation is ~extrinsic~...

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🤔 You see, ~extrinsic~ motivation is not sustainable, unlike ~intrinsic~ motivation. Once the reward is gone -- well why do the thing at all? And studies show that this process itself undermines any intrinsic motivation the person may have had in the first place. Sneaky!

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❗ The moral of the story: Beware rewards! And, by all means, try to foster intrinsic motivation in you children, in your students, and in your workers!

This may seem obvious now... Because it worked. As the story was being written, it was new, bold, counterintuitive.

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Plus it's a simple, compelling narrative:

💎 Intrinsic motivation is good
📉 But extrinsic rewards can undermine it
🎉 So we do away with rewards and punishment and put the fun back where it belongs!

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"Intrinsic motivation" has left psychology and economics and sought a life of its own in public discourse. Society looks to stop schools from "killing intrinsic motivation", managers have caught on, gamification is... a thing.

And that's all fine and dandy.

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PART 2: OUTSIDE IN

But we mustn't forget our origins: science brought us "intrinsic motivation", but it never stood still. We've known for a while now that the original story is naive and incomplete.

We do things for external reasons all 👏 the 👏 time 👏 .

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Brushing my teeth isn't "fun", neither is turn signalling (it seems almost painful for some -- are you okay?), nor voting for that matter. What gives?

Well, 🤷‍♂️ turns out we can be moved to act (be motivated) for different reasons 🤯. Can you believe it?

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Ok, Mr Obvious. Not the point! The point was intrinsic motivation is ~better~ than extrinsic motivation, not that it's the only kind. Duh!

But uhm.. We do things for external reasons all 👏 the 👏 time 👏 . Like, a lot. Like, we're almost always "extrinsically motivated"

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Let that sink in.

Almost everything we do is extrinsically motivated. Certainly a lot of the things that Matter are done for reasons other than pure enjoyment, are done in spite of the pain they cause. And yet we willingly do them.

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What's more, so much of what we do is externally ~regulated~. We learn to abide by the rules of society, parental expectations, arbitrary lines, not because it's fun, but because... Well, why?

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Why, indeed.

Extrinsic motivation is not our villain, nor external regulation its sidekick. And, importantly, they're not monolithic, either. They come in many shapes and qualities; they're a story all unto themselves. A story with more characters, more nuance.

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The story goes a little like this...

PROLOGUE:

✨ Humans are intrinsically motivated to do many things. But that's not that interesting. We like doing things that are enjoyable. Moving on!

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MAIN STORY:

🤔 Humans apparently are also motivated to do a lot of stuff that's... not so enjoyable. Like using spreadsheets (I see you, @standupmaths, and I selectively ignore you.)

This kind of motivation seems to come in more flavors...

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Sometimes, we do things really gladly. Other times, begrudgingly. Other times yet, doing the things chips away at our well-being. It's almost like there are different kinds of extrinsic motivation? It's like, it depends, you know?

You can...

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😨💸 do the thing for a reward, or for fear of external consequences
🥴🎭 do the thing out of an internal punishment, like shame
🤔✔ do the thing because you think/agree it's the right thing
😇💎 do the thing because it's totally coherent with your own sense of self

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I promised you some science, so: We now say motivation varies along a continuum, from more controlled to more autonomous. And the four "options" above vary along it.

Science is also about charts, right? Have a look at this one:

https://twitter.com/centerforSDT/status/935914261746016256

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If I may brag, I also made a chart once. Years ago I wrote about all this in much greater detail (here, if you must.. medium.com/@vascobrazao/h…), and illustrated it with this piece of art:

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As you can see, our new characters have names -- external regulation, introjection, identification, integration -- but they don't matter for our purposes. What matters is the new story:

~AUTONOMOUS~ motivation is better than ~CONTROLLED~ motivation.

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This story acknowledges that we often ask others (and ourselves) to act in certain ways or do certain things that are not intrinsically rewarding. That's fine. But there *are* better and worse ways to do it.

What matters?

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PART 3: MORE THAN THIS

It turns out, the quality of our motivation is shaped by the same three ingredients required for human flourishing and psychological well-being: 🙋‍♂️ Autonomy, 🛠 Competence, and 💞 Relatedness.

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🙋‍♂️ Autonomy is our need to *endorse* our actions. Our need to feel like we are acting out of our own volition, in a way that is congruent with out sense of self.

We feel autonomy when we genuinely want to do the thing, when we feel like we chose to do the thing.

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🛠 Competence is our need for feelings of effectance and mastery -- to feel we are able to effect change in the world, and that we can do it well.

We feel competence when we know how to do the thing well, or believe we can learn how to do the thing well.

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💞 Relatedness is our need for positive social connections, for belonging to groups larger than ourselves, for caring about and being cared about by others.

We feel relatedness when we feel secure in our relationships.

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So, no. High quality motivation is not just about fostering intrinsic curiosity or making everything fun. High quality (autonomous) motivation comes from having our basic psychological needs satisfied. It is harder to do, and so much more meaningful.

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The briefest "how-to guide" might be warranted. How do you make someone do something autonomously?

Seems like a trick question (*they* have to want it), but if you've interacted with a child you know it must be done. We are not born wanting all the right things...

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The solution lies in doing your very best to support their basic psychological needs. It lies in actually caring about them as a person with agency, with a sense of self, who's in a relationship (of some kind) with you.

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For 🙋‍♂️autonomy, give choice when possible, and for Pete's sake *explain* why it is important that they do the thing. "Because I said so" is not a reason. Who knows, you might convince them!

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For 🛠competence, give positive feedback. Make your negative feedback informational, not personal. Give the resources for the person to do the thing successfully. And if you must direct them with guidelines, make them clear, consistent, and reasonable.

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For 💞relatedness, be fucking kind. Tough love is immature; do better. Take interest in their thoughts, feelings, concerns, without judging. And do not pit your love up against their autonomy, don't be conditional with your love ("I'll only like you if you are thus").

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Phew. If that up there wasn't enough, I wrote a lot more words about this, with specific examples of behaviors for each psychological need here medium.com/@vascobrazao/h… But who has time to read so many words? This thread is long as it is.

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PART 4: GROWING UP

"Intrinsic motivation" has had its fun. It was invented,it jumped out of academia into people's vocabulary, and we all now know a little more about motivation than before. But we can do better.

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"Intrinsic motivation" encourages you to think about fun, curiosity, humans' natural drive to do things because doing things is fun. That's cool, but it's so restrictive.

"Autonomous motivation" encourages you think about 🙋‍♂️ Autonomy, 🛠 Competence, and 💞 Relatedness.

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"Autonomous motivation" acknowledges that we don't always want to do what we want to do. That tasks can be boring. That rules are, like, so dumb, but they are also important sometimes. And it gives you a framework to think about how to make it better.

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"Intrinsic motivation" makes you think of the incentive structure (and do you really know enough economics or Cognitive Evaluation Theory to do that well?).

"Autonomous motivation" reminds you that you're thinking about a whole person.

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LinkedIn influencers gonna influence; business leaders gonna write books or whatever. I can't stop you.

But next time you want a snappy article on how to increase intrinsic motivation, don't. Let it rest. No one's writing about autonomous motivation yet, grab your chance!

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After all, "intrinsic motivation" dates to at least the 70s, while "autonomous motivation" is fresh and- wait, no, it's old too. Whatever. I guess it's too nuanced for Linkedin. I tried. Fin.

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