Edward Deci with Richard Flaste. Why We Do What We Do: Understanding Self-Motivation. Penguin Books, 1995.
Below are four common motivational practices to solve real-world problems related to educating our youth. Near the end of this review, I provide a translation in light of the motivational theory under discussion along with possible unintended consequences.
How do we get our own children to do chores?
Common practice: Create a competition between siblings, paying the child most who completes the most chores.
How do we get children to become better readers?
Common practice: Fund a program that pays children for each book they read over the summer.
How do we ensure that elementary students stand quietly in the lunch line?
Common practice: Have a principal walk up to the group of students and compliment a single student, noting “look how well so and so is standing quietly in line.”
How do we ensure students become engaged in learning mathematics?
Common practice: Deploy an adaptive online mathematics program that incentivizes student performance through badges, level changes, and other forms of affirmation.
In his book titled Why We Do What We Do: Understanding Self-Motivation (1995), Dr. Edward Deci describes how individuals in “one-up” positions (parents, teachers, coaches, managers) employ the above techniques to motivate individuals under their care who are in “one-down” positions (children, students, employees). In its popular usage, motivation is something we do to someone to ensure they behave in a desired manner. Deci takes a critical look at this practice, uncovering unintended consequences of what he calls controlled motivation. He suggests that the more effective approach is to create an autonomy-supportive environment where individuals will motivate themselves.
Read more: Abuse of Language, Abuse of Power
Deci is Professor of Psychology and Social Sciences at the University of Rochester and founder, along with Dr. Richard Ryan, of self-determination theory (Deci & Ryan, 1985). This meta-theory of motivation views individuals as naturally inclined to engage in and understand their environment, suggesting that the act of learning is hardwired into humans. Over 40 years of research has shown that the basic psychological needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness must be met to ensure quality motivation, well-being, and thriving. Deci and associates have also shown that social factors, including parenting and schooling, can either foster or thwart quality motivation. In the present work, Deci articulates the problem of controlled motivation in a range of contexts, both within and outside of education. He also provides recommendations to support autonomy and a sense of volition. While primarily citing his own research, he also draws on work from research by his colleagues and collaborators.
Early in the book, Deci describes a scene at the Prospect Park Zoo in Brooklyn where a team of feeders are throwing fish to entice seals to perform for the audience:
As they drop each fish into the mouth of a ravenous seal, the seal will do almost anything to keep the supply coming. Clap their flippers together; wave to the crowd; arch their bodies like mermaids in a fountain. It’s all there, and the spectators love it. (p. 17)
He suggests that parents in the audience might view the spectacle as evidence that the administration of contingent rewards might be an effective means to motivate their children. However, the story continues: “Just as soon as the feeders disappear, so too do the entertaining behaviors. The seals no longer have interest in clapping their flippers together or waving to the crowd” (p. 17). While contingent rewards may work in the short term, once they are removed, the desired behavior stops.
Deci spent a career studying similar phenomena in humans by examining the unintended consequences of motivational techniques, including the administration of praise and rewards. In the 1970s, Deci established an experimental research design where participants, often college students, were asked to engage in some interesting activity, such as solving a puzzle. Deci would incentivize the experimental group, perhaps paying them for each puzzle they solved within a time limit. The control group would simply be told to solve as many puzzles as they could. Results often showed that individuals who were incentivized solved more puzzles than those in the control group. However, the more important part of the study occurred when the researcher left the room during a planned break, a free-choice period where participants had materials to occupy their time, including magazines and newspapers. Participants could read, sit and daydream, or continue to work on the puzzle. Deci surreptitiously observed through one-way glass and recorded time spent engaging with the puzzle, a proxy for intrinsic motivation. As hypothesized, participants in the control group (no incentive) spent significantly more time returning to the puzzle than those in the experimental group (those paid per puzzle), indicating that the incentive undermined long-term intrinsic motivation. Deci and associates repeated this methodology with a variety of participants, conditions, and contexts with similar results.
Read more: The World Beyond Your Head
While solving a puzzle in an experimental setting could be characterized as an inherently enjoyable task, what about real-world activities, such as doing chores or homework, that may not be interesting or enjoyable? Deci and associates addressed this question by assessing how individuals internalize extrinsic goals, describing motivation as a continuum, rather than the intrinsic-extrinsic binary. Through empirical research, they showed that perceptions of a controlling environment thwarted the process of internalization. Deci employs a range of terms to illustrate these instrumental tactics with verbs like entice, prod, direct, pressure, demand, cajole, coerce, and seduce. According to Deci, controlling motivational techniques, such as administering token reinforcements, contingent rewards, and praise, undermine quality motivation. To foster internalization, individuals need to experience a sense of volition (autonomy), feelings of repeated success (competence), and support from significant others (relatedness).
Self-determination theory has been applied to a range of contexts, including competitive athletics, performing arts, and the workplace. These contexts have in common a heightened need for achievement or compliance, with clear measures of success. Coaches and managers often employ controlling practices, such as systems of rewards and punishments, to efficiently gain compliance. Stories of promising athletes and musicians who experience early burnout align with Deci’s hypothesis. Controlling environments, though effective in the short run, often undermine long-term intrinsic motivation. For an athlete or artist to persist in their craft, they must eventually learn to value the activity, experience it authentically in terms of their sense of self, and motivate themselves without their coach’s prodding. Similarly, employees who are micromanaged tend to acquiesce, which minimizes creativity, risk-taking behaviors, and personal identification with the organization’s goals. Deci also references research in healthcare where controlling treatment practices are less effective than those involving autonomy support. He suggests that the medical provider build a partnership with the patient by employing autonomy-supportive techniques, including “taking the other’s perspective, offering choice, providing relevant information that the other person may have no access to, giving the rationale for suggestions or requests, acknowledging the other’s feelings, and minimizing the use of controlling language and attitudes” (p. 172).
Perhaps the context where self-determination theory applies the most directly is education, since it allows us to observe how motivational techniques affect the innate drive to learn. Schools are saturated with extrinsic motivators in the form of deadlines, grades, high-stakes tests, honor rolls, praise, stickers, certificates, gold stars, trophies, competition, controlling language, surveillance, monetary rewards, class ranking, and college acceptance. In such a highly incentivized environment, it is not surprising that academic motivation drops consistently from kindergarten through eighth grade (Gottfried & Gottfried, 1996).
Applying the terminology of self-determination theory to schools, autonomy represents a perceived internal locus of control for actions and manifests itself in the school setting through students’ perception of choice and agentic behaviors, such as asking questions and making suggestions for class activities. Competence can be expressed as students’ expectation of successful performance of tasks, reflecting feelings of self-efficacy based upon successive mastery experiences. Relatedness concerns how an individual interacts with significant others, expressed in terms of a sense of belonging within the classroom and relationships with the teacher and fellow students. According to Deci, when these basic human needs are met, actions originate from the self and are fully endorsed at the cognitive level, leading to a range of positive outcomes, including optimal experience, self-determination, and well-being. Conversely, when the basic needs are not met, individuals experience low-quality motivation where actions are compelled, leading to cognitive dissonance, a-motivation, and ill-being.
Conceding that many behaviors in school, such as completing homework or studying for tests, are not inherently interesting, one could characterize the internalization of extrinsic goals as central to the educative process. Deci presents categories of internalization within a continuum, ranging from external to introjected, identified, and integrated regulation. In the school setting, external regulation occurs when a student completes assignments or school activities to receive a grade, contingent reward, praise, or seeks to avoid external contingencies, such as teacher or parent punishment. Introjected regulation can be exemplified by a student who exerts internal correction, perhaps striving to arrive at class on time to avoid the teacher’s scolding. While the student’s act may appear volitional, it also “involves coercion or seduction and does not entail true choice” (Deci, Koestner, & Ryan, 1991, p. 329). Identified regulation could be illustrated by a student completing extra credit assignments, not for the inherent joy of learning, but perhaps to increase academic outcomes. Although still extrinsic, the student begins to associate the behavior with a sense of self, often independent of teacher prompting. With integrated regulation, the student’s ego involvement in an activity becomes more salient and in harmony with other motivations, even though the action is performed “for its presumed instrumental value with respect to some outcome that is separate from the behavior” (Ryan & Deci, 2000, p. 62). When studying the motivation of elementary to middle-level students, researchers have found that students were too young to have fully integrated academic motivation in various domains (Ryan & Connell, 1989). Ryan and Deci (2000) describe a-motivation, where a student lacks both extrinsic and intrinsic motivation to engage in academic tasks, often due to feelings of incompetence. On the opposite end of the continuum would be intrinsic motivation, where a student engages in academic tasks for their inherent enjoyment (Deci, 1975).
Deci and associates conducted a series of experiments in schools to examine the effects of grades on motivation and performance in school. In one study, they asked college students to read a passage of text where the experimental group would be graded on a test, and the control group would just have to teach the material to other students. After administering a test to both groups, those who were told they would be tested scored relatively lower on intrinsic motivation and relatively higher than the control group on rote memorization, but lower on conceptual understanding. They replicated the study with elementary students and had similar results, amplified by the finding that those in the experimental group (those expecting a test) were able to recall less of the text a week later than those in the control group. The implications of these and similar studies are that extrinsic motivators foster surface-level learning, hamper creativity, and reduce performance. Though well-intended, teachers may inadvertently be employing motivational techniques that undermine long-term love of learning . . . and performance.
Read more: Beauty for Truth’s Sake
Perhaps the example of paying students to read crystalizes understanding of the potential undermining effects of extrinsic motivators. Most educators would characterize reading as an inherently enjoyable activity. With that in mind, applying a reward would be unnecessary and potentially problematic. Deci cites Lepper, Greene, and Nisbett (1973) who termed rewarding an already interesting task the overjustification hypothesis. Although children may initially attribute personal causation to the act of reading, “they will, post behaviorally, assess the situation, noting that there was a strong external cause. They will then attribute causality for their behavior to the external cause and discount any plausible internal cause, namely intrinsic motivation” (Deci & Ryan, 1985, p. 201). With respect to the rewarded activity, “There was more than enough justification (i.e., there was overjustification) so they will discount the internal justification” (p. 201). Simply stated, by paying students to read, parents and educators may inadvertently choke out the initial intrinsic motivation, superimposing the idea that reading is not inherently enjoyable and requires a contingent reward to be meaningful.
Within the educational context, praise is ubiquitous and is often described as a best practice. However, Deci describes praise as a verbal reward that leverages the need for relatedness and can be experienced as controlling or autonomy-supportive. He found that praise interpreted as informational fostered long-term intrinsic motivation while controlling praise had an undermining effect. According to Deci:
This research highlighted the fact that even praise when used as an interpersonal reward can have a negative effect on the enjoyment and motivation of people receiving it, and the problem once again is control. It is imperative, when using praise, to be careful about your own intentions. Are you praising in an attempt to get the person to do more? Are you perhaps being subtly controlling? With praise, with rewards, with limits, if you want to use them in a way that does not undermine intrinsic motivation, you have to take pains to minimize the controlling language, the controlling style, and your own agenda of controlling the other person’s behavior. (p. 69)
In light of the above discussion of Deci’s work, we are now in a position to better understand the implications of the four motivational tactics I provided at the beginning of this review:
To get our children to do chores, create a competition between siblings, paying the child most who completes the most chores.
Translation: Establish a system of contingent rewards to incentivize an uninteresting task, leveraging the competition and parental approval.
Unintended consequences: Sibling may exhibit unhealthy competition, perhaps never developing internal regulation to help around the house without prompting.
To encourage our children to become better readers, fund a program that pays children for each book they read over the summer.
Translation: Provide an expected reward for completing an inherently fun activity, exemplifying the overjustification effect (rewarding virtue).
Unintended consequences: Children may internalize the idea that reading requires a reward, possibly losing the desire to read when the incentive is removed.
To ensure elementary students stand quietly in the lunch line, have a principal walk up to the group of students and compliment a single student, noting “look how well so and so is standing quietly in line.”
Translation: Administer public praise by “catching a student doing well” on a behavior that requires no more than passive compliance, leveraging the student’s desire for affirmation from the teacher and fellow students.
Unintended consequences: Students may interpret the praise as controlling, perhaps developing unhealthy competition with each other for the favor of their teachers, or resenting the student who received the public praise.
To increase student engagement in mathematics, deploy an adaptive online mathematics program that incentivizes student performance through badges, level changes, and other forms of affirmation.
Translation: Apply concepts of gamification and token reinforcements to maximize student engagement in mathematics.
Unintended consequences: Students may grow to value the gamification elements more than the mathematics content and perhaps have difficulty motivating themselves in a non-gamified environment.
A final word about applying Deci’s research to classical schools. In an effort to teach truth, goodness, and beauty, it is important to understand students’ motivational orientation. Are they reading great books to obtain a good grade, to please their teacher, or because they love the experience? Perhaps the answer is a combination, implying that motivation is nuanced and a moving target. In any case, classical educators strive to develop students who will continue to pursue intellectual endeavors beyond the schoolhouse walls. And they want their students to perform the right actions even when no one is watching. Deci suggests that educators take a critical look at their motivational techniques and consider the unintended consequences along with their own motivation. To use Nietzsche’s (1968, original work published 1889) metaphor, quality motivation can be visualized as “a self-propelling wheel” [ein aus-sich rollendes Rad] where the individual does not need to be pushed in order to move forward.
Although written in 1995, Deci’s work provides a perfect introduction to the concepts of controlling and autonomy-supportive motivation. As a preeminent cognitive psychologist and co-author of self-determination theory, Deci has published extensively in top-tier journals and books. In the current work, his language is lucid, conversational, engaging, and lacking in technical jargon. He provides ample examples to bring to life a theory that is often counter to current educational practices. Since Deci’s work was published, educators have doubled down on extrinsic motivation in the form of standardized tests, teacher incentives, competition, awards programs, and the practice of plastering college acceptance notifications in the newspaper. His work deserves consideration, particularly by classical educators who would like to foster virtuous motivation within their students. It is a tantalizing idea to study the why behind the good.
Steven J. Bourgeois, PhD is the CEO of Ahart Solutions, an educational research firm supporting schools of choice. He has been in public education for 25 years as a high school German teacher, head tennis coach, state testing coordinator, and director of research. He served as executive director for one of the largest charter organizations in the United States. He is an adjunct professor at the University of Texas at Arlington and the University of Dallas. He holds a B.A. in music, B.A. in German, and M.A. in German Literature, all from the University of Oregon. He obtained a Ph.D. in Educational Leadership and Policy Studies from the University of Texas at Arlington. Dr. Bourgeois has a record of publication in peer-reviewed educational journals and presentations at state, regional, national, and international conferences in the areas of student motivation/engagement, transformational leadership, and collective teacher efficacy.
References
Deci, E. (1975). Intrinsic motivation. New York: Plenum Press.
Deci, E., Koestner, R., & Ryan, R. (1999). A Meta-analytic review of experiments examining the effects of extrinsic rewards on intrinsic motivation. Psychological Bulletin, 125(6), 627-668.
Deci, E. L., & Ryan, R. M. (1985). Intrinsic motivation and self-determination in human behavior. New York, NY: Plenum.
Gottfried, A.E., & Gottfried, A.W. (1996). A longitudinal study of academic intrinsic motivation in intellectually gifted children: Childhood through early adolescence. Gifted Child Quarterly, 40, 179-183.
Lepper, M., Greene, D., & Nisbett, R. (1973). Undermining children’s intrinsic interest with extrinsic reward: A test of the “overjustification” hypothesis. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 28(1), 129-137.
Nietzsche, F. (1968). Twilight of the idols (R.J. Hollingdale, Trans.). New York: Penguin Books. (Original work published 1989)
Ryan, R. M., & Connell, J. P. (1989). Perceived locus of causality and internalization: Examining reasons for acting in two domains. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 57, 749–761.
Ryan, R.M., & Deci, E.L. (2000). Intrinsic and extrinsic motivations: Classic definitions and new directions. Contemporary Educational Psychology, 25, 54–67.