Intrinsic Motivation: a deep dive

This result is completely plausible to me: it makes sense that if you promise a kid an unknown reward for playing a drum, and then you hide the unknown reward in a box placed conspicuously in front of them, they will experience less enjoyment when they play the drum.

Intrinsic Motivation: a deep dive

In discussion of issues or poking holes in theory, author frames this situation as purely a result of distraction. But is distraction simple? Like in this situation, if distracted, is the kid totally unable to engage in the goal? And if aware of the distraction, as his constant attention-switching will alert him to, won’t he feel the distraction as a force controlling or constraining him? It is a limit on his ability to make a free choice, and it’s not some god-given limit.

I thought it was worth adding that Henderlong and Lepper (2002) did a review of the praise research and found that when praise was viewed as informational, i.e. conveying genuine information about competence, it increased intrinsic motivation, whereas when praise was viewed as controlling, it harmed it.

Intrinsic Motivation: a deep dive

Praise has layers…can’t be so bald as to just say nice job to every kid. Then they know you’re lying

The trend here, as I’m sure you’ve noticed, is that there are certain kinds of behaviours that we – or, at least, animals generally – are reliably motivated to perform but that have never been reinforced. A certain class of these behaviours seems to be tied to exploration, and this class of behaviour is often far more resistant to extinction than... See more

Intrinsic Motivation: a deep dive

SDT’s stance, so far as I can work it out, is that relatedness is often a background requirement for intrinsic motivation.

Intrinsic Motivation: a deep dive

Relatedness is the water the fish are swimming in

The explanation put forward in the paper was that rewards that are more proximal to the desired behaviour – e.g. books for reading or, say, paint brushes for painting – do not have the same negative impact on intrinsic motivation as token rewards like money or stickers.

Intrinsic Motivation: a deep dive

Turns out that the group with the salient reward showed significantly less intrinsic motivation in the free choice period than the group with the non-salient reward. Ross concluded that the salience of the reward seems to modulate its impact: the more salient, the stronger the deleterious effect on intrinsic motivation.

Intrinsic Motivation: a deep dive

Salience in SDT is equivalent to how distracting or attention-grabbing the reward is, ie if an investment is could net a lot of money, does the anticipated money detract from analysis of the investment.

Turns out that participants who were given positive feedback generally displayed MORE free-choice persistence, i.e. intrinsic motivation, than those weren’t given any feedback at all.

Intrinsic Motivation: a deep dive

In a bid to create a condition with neither positive nor negative feedback, they instructed researchers within this condition to remain silent and unresponsive to any overtures from the children.

Intrinsic Motivation: a deep dive

Batshit insensitivity needed to ask good scientific questions

This whole point is interesting, because it suggests that performance contingent rewards might act as something like a gate-keeping function: anyone that performs well will receive enough competence affirming information to keep their intrinsic motivation for the activity alive.

Intrinsic Motivation: a deep dive

Agreed