Interlude Topic- Motivation-ARCHIVED

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Introduction

Today, I will be breaking away from education for a moment, because there is one topic that is actually still relevant to education, but it is much more broad, and actually encompasses all sectors of life. It is the thing that drives us to do things, it is the main driving force of human action (and living things). Today, we shall talk about motivation. Before anything else, what is motivation? Motivation is the reason or reason why someone acts or behaves a particular way. Motivation is also the willingness or desire to do something. In this post, I will quote a TED Talk by Dan Pink, and most of the information here will be from there, so you may want to watch that video first for some context. Enjoy!

Relevance with Education

As I have said, motivation is a very important thing in human lives. As motivation is the desire or willingness to do anything. It is also the reason why people do things. Of course, people participate in education because they have a motivation, whatever it is. There are different kinds of motivation, but as time progresses, we begin to forget what our motivation should be. In education, the purpose is to gain more knowledge and to gain useful skills that we can practice in our daily lives, but now, it has been degraded to simply getting scores, passing the grade, graduate, go to university, graduate, get jobs, and done. Anyway, let's dive in, shall we?

The 2 Types

There are 2 main kinds of motivation, intrinsic motivation, and extrinsic motivation. Intrinsic motivation is the desire to do something because they are intrinsically valuable for people, or they matter to that person. For example, doing things because they are our passion, they have a moral value, doing the task is pleasurable in it's own sense, there is a higher end, or there is a sense of rightness. Extrinsic motivation is motivation from the outside, that is when the reason for doing things are external. For example, being promised a monetary reward for doing things, being promised scores for performing well in a test, threatened with a hefty punishment if you don't do a certain something. Essentially, extrinsic motivation is the carrots and sticks. Do something to get a reward, or you'll get punished.

The Case

I would like to remind you that most of the information I have here will be taken from Dan Pink's TED Talk The Puzzle of Motivation, so go check it out. Anyway, I will paraphrase the talk. So we have a famous experiment, known as The Candle Problem. In this experiment, subjects are given a candle, matches, and a box of thumbtacks, as seen in the image above. The task is to attach the candle to the wall so when you light the candle, it doesn't drip wax onto the table. Many people develop creative ideas, some tried attaching the candle using a thumbtack, but failed. Other try to light a match and heat the side of the candle, so it melts, and tries to adhere it to the wall, again, doesn't work. After a while, most people figure out the solution, that is take the thumbtacks out, place the candle on the box, and adhere the box with the candle to the wall using the thumbtacks. Finally, light the candle. The solution can be seen in the image below.

In this experiment, we have to overcome what's called functional fixedness. Most people would see the small box as only a container for the thumbtacks, but they don't realize that the box can also be used as a platform for the candle. For your information, this experiment was first made by a psychologist named Karl Duncker in 1945. So this experiment is quite old.

Now in 1962, a scientist named Sam Glucksberg used this experiment to test the power of incentives. So he put the subjects into 2 groups, to both groups he said that he was going to time them on how quick can they solve the problem. In one group, he said, "I'm going to time you to establish norms, averages for how long it typically takes someone to solve this problem." To the other group, he said, "If you're in the top 25% of the fastest times, I will give you five dollars. If you're the fastest of everyone we're testing here today, you get 20 dollars." Adjusted for inflation, the rewards back then would be 40 dollars and 160 dollars today. Now this amount is even bigger than the amount at the time of Dan Pink's TED Talk. This is a decent amount of money for several minutes of work. It's a nice motivator.

Now the question is, how much faster did the second group solve this problem? The question makes sense as we expect that if you promise someone a reward for completing a task, they will perform better. Anyway, the answer is, the second group performed, 3.5 minutes, LONGER. That was surprising, wasn't it? In the video, he stated that this is not how it's supposed to work, he believes in free markets. I don't believe in free markets, nor do I support capitalism, but that's a topic for another day. Most of the time, if you want people to perform better, you reward them, right? But that is not happening here, instead these incentives just dulls thinking and blocks creativity,

There is a possibility that this experiment is a freak result, but no, this experiment has been replicated for over 40 years, with similar results. Now, Glucksberg made the same experiment again, but with a slight difference, you can see it in the picture below.

As you can see, the box and the thumbtacks are presented as 2 different materials, thus it is much easier now isn't it? In this experiment, there was still 2 groups, on one group: we're testing for norms, and the other group: we're incentivizing. This time, the second group performed much better than the first group. You see, when the experiment is presented that way, it's much more easier, as functional fixedness is gone.

This experiment proves one thing, that external motivators, the if-then reward system, the carrots and sticks, are good for tasks that only involve mechanical skills. That is they already have clear defined goals and a simple set of rules. But when the task involves thinking, then extrinsic motivators just fails, or they even do harm. This is not the last part though, let me give you more evidence.

Economist Dan Ariely and 3 colleagues did a study on MIT students. They gave the students some games, games that involved creativity, motor skills, and concentration. They offered 3 levels of rewards for performance. If students performed very well, they get the largest rewards, and so on. Now as long as the games only involved mechanical skills, bonuses work as they are expected, the higher the reward, the higher the performance. But once the games involved basic thinking skills, the higher the reward, the worse the performance. Of course, the economists were worried that there might be a cultural bias, so they went to Madurai, India.

In India, same deal, some games, 3 levels of rewards. The results are, people offered the medium reward performs no better than the people offered smallest rewards. But, this time, people offered the highest amount of rewards, performed the worse of all. Now capitalists might think this is somekind of a socialist conspiracy, but no, these economists are from MIT, Carnegie Mellon, the University of Chicago. And who sponsored this research? The Federal Reserve Bank of The United States.

Meanwhile, in the London School of Economics, economists looked at 51 studies for pay-for-performance plans in companies. They said, "We find that financial incentives can result in a negative impact on overall performance." Anyway, Dan Pink eventually continues that we should not do more of the wrong things, or entice them with a sweeter carrot, or threaten them with a sharper stick. We need a whole new approach.

This new approach is built around the opposite of the carrots and sticks, it's called intrinsic motivation. In his talk, Dan said that there are 3 elements within intrinsic motivation. There are autonomy, mastery, and purpose. Autonomy is the urge to direct our own lives, Mastery is the desire to get better and better at something that matters, and Purpose is the yearning to do what we do in service of something larger than themselves. He then continues with examples of autonomy, but we'll cover that later.

Final Statements

I will continue this post next time, as next time we will discuss intrinsic motivation and it's 3 elements. Anyway, let's wrap up, today I have covered the topic of motivation as presented by Dan Pink. Next time, we will cover the continuation of this topic, and maybe in the near future I can start proposing solutions to the system, that's all for today folks, thanks for reading!

Sources: http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pink_on_motivation/transcript?language=en

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