Discover What Motivates You

[photo by Felix63]

[Note: You can also listen to this post as a podcast]

It’s such an emotional rush to walk into a clean kitchen. Well, it is when it’s been cleaned by your child. When you have four children you just get used to your house never being quite as tidy as you would like it to be. And when those children get old enough to make themselves something to eat, you can pretty much plan on not seeing a clean kitchen again for a while. So it was a bit of a surprise to see the kitchen so thoroughly cleaned.

I could feel my muscles relax as though I were getting a Swedish massage while standing there in the doorway. My eyes swept through the room, across the counters, table and stove—all clean. This is how life should be I thought with self-satisfaction, we’ve finally arrived. Could it really be true, all those years of cajoling our kids had finally paid off?

“None of us is the person we wish we were, but we're also not the person we think we are.”

This was not the first time one of our daughters has cleaned the kitchen but it was particularly rewarding in that neither my wife nor I had been forced to threaten a fine, imprisonment, or bodily harm to get it done. Ever since our oldest child could load a dishwasher we’ve struggled with getting our children to do their chores and she’s going to college next year. That's a lot of struggling. But here we are, on the cusp of a brand new life. A life of cleanliness.

This is not a post about how to raise your children. I’ve long ago realized I’m no expert in that area. My current philosophy is children are just going to make messes. They’re going to ruin carpets and break things, sometimes even hurt themselves. It’s not something we have much control over. They are born with their own unique personalities and predispositions, all we can do is facilitate their development. Some things must be done in a civilized society however, and keeping a clean house is one of them.

No, this post is not about raising children, it’s about motivation; what motivates our children and what motivates each of us. And if you think it’s odd for me to question what motivates myself let me explain. I have always thought I knew what my motivations were but the more I have thought about it, the more I've realized I didn’t really know. In real life none of us is the person we wish we were, and due to our biased perspective, we're also not the person we think we are.

Motivate me

I’m the kind of person who likes to get the right answer when questioned, to do well on tests, etc. So whenever I have asked myself what’s motivating me to do a particular thing I usually come up with the most appropriate response--the one I think is most admirable to others--which is not necessarily the most accurate. I don't do this deceptively, or with any conscious attempt to appear pious, it's just the answer that "feels" right to me.

But when I really think hard about motivation it all gets a little fuzzy, starting with the word motivation itself. If you can believe it, people actually disagree on how to define motivation. For me it's as simple as this: motivation is what causes you to do the things you do. You can be motivated by love, greed, altruism, and anger. Sometimes it’s a desire to experience pleasure or avoid pain. Sometimes it’s simply the comfortable feeling of maintaining habits we established long ago.

“Money can act as an intrinsic drive to improve our performance and as an extrinsic motivator.”

It’s true, we're frequently motivated by money but it’s more complicated than it appears at first glance. Money has no inherent value but acts as both an intrinsic and extrinsic motivator. We may think of money being a primary motivator for disadvantaged people but many wealthy people see money as the scoring mechanism for life; the more money you have, the better you are at playing the economic game. So money can act on our intrinsic drive to improve our performance and as an extrinsic motivator in its role as a proxy for all the things we can purchase.

These two broad classifications, intrinsic and extrinsic, are the way experts categorize motivation. A big part of America’s success has been attributed to the Puritan Work Ethic the early pilgrims embodied. They were motivated by personal pride in quality workmanship and the notion that any job worth doing was a job worth doing well.

Juggling intrinsic and extrinsic motivation

As a student of economics I have always had a soft spot in my heart for extrinsic motivation. It seemed to explain a lot of human interactions and was much more predictable. If I wanted someone to change their behavior I simply had to offer them a financial incentive to do so. While I like to think my motives are more pure, it always seemed feasible other people were viewing the world through paradigms based purely on self-interest.

Some economists take this to the extreme, even claiming the most altruistic acts are somehow extrinsically motivated; taking into account the promised rewards to be received in the afterlife. The Puritan Work Ethic, they say, was not intrinsically motivated at all. It was motivated by the Puritans' attempting to secure their reward in the eternities or to attain a higher social status in this life by signaling to their contemporaries their chosen status.

“Signaling is most often done subconsciously and in more subtle ways.”

Signaling theory, recently fashionable in economic explanations of inexplicable behavior, claims people are motivated to make seemingly irrational choices for the purpose of signaling their desirability to others. When this is done ostentatiously, on a conscious level, we call it “posing”, “flaunting”, or “conspicuous consumption”, but most often it is done subconsciously and in more subtle ways. The interesting thing about signaling is, it takes our desire for community acceptance (an extrinsic motivator) and uses it to strengthen our intrinsic motivation (to feel good about ourselves).

Richard Ryan and Edward Deci examined the connection between internal and external incentives. Their paper Intrinsic and Extrinsic Motivations (.pdf) concludes we use social context to support intrinsic motivation. When we satisfy our need to feel connected with others, to be seen as personally effective, and to be autonomous, we are more able to maintain our inner drive and to appropriately respond to external incentives. They conclude intrinsic motivation is in effect tied to extrinsic factors.

The Ryan and Deci study reminded me of Dan Pink's fascinating explanation of intrinsic motivation from his latest book Drive (captured in this entertaining video). Pink’s claim is, extrinsic motivators, such as money, don’t work well when it comes to the performance of cognitive tasks. They work fine, he says, when tasks only involve following a pattern or performing a routine job but when it comes to creativity or problem solving, people need intrinsic motivators like autonomy, mastery, and purpose, to drive their performance.

Is it one or the other?

In the case of motivating my children I have most often taken an expectancy approach, pointing out the connection between their behavior and subsequent rewards and punishments. They could learn through repetition what outcome to expect for certain behavior. It seems reasonable to me that people want to do what preserves or improves their happiness. But did my extrinsic motivations of punishments and rewards detract from their intrinsic motivation to do the job simply because it needed to be done?

This question led me to a study by Uri Gneezy and Aldo Rustichini. They attempted to determine if adding an extrinsic motivation would affect intrinsic motivation. Their approach was to add an external, monetary, incentive to parents who were late picking their children up from a daycare center in Israel. Before the study, parents were not fined for picking up their children late, they were motivated to arrive on time out of an intrinsic sense of politeness or social duty.

“Extrinsic motivation seems to have negated the intrinsic drive to be on time.”

During the study, parents who picked up their children late were given a modest fine. Now the parents were not only motivated by their intrinsic sense of duty but also by an extrinsic punishment. One would have expected tardiness to decline. In fact, the exact opposite of what economist predicted occurred, more people started arriving late.

The lesson Dan Ariely (author of Predictably Irrational) draws from this example is one of motivation. Parents are, presumably, busy—that’s why their children are in daycare—and they try to accomplish as much as possible prior to picking up their children. Before the fine was imposed people felt an intrinsic motivation to be there on time, but once the extrinsic motivation was introduced it seems to have negated the internal drive to be on time. When the intrinsic motivation was replaced with an extrinsic one, the cost/benefit calculation was different, and the outcome unexpected.

Surprising outcomes and tough decisions

Interestingly, when the study was concluded the daycare center stopped charging a fine for late pick-ups but parents continued arriving late. It appears as though once the motivation had become extrinsic, the removal of the incentive wasn’t replaced with the original intrinsic incentive. When the external motivation was removed they continued to act as though the motivation was still extrinsic, the cost had simply been reduced.

In another study by Lepper, Greene and Nisbett, Undermining Children’s Intrinsic Interest with Extrinsic Reward (.pdf), children who showed a propensity to draw when provided with art materials were divided into two groups, one of which was given a reward for drawing. When the extrinsic reward was no longer available the rewarded group was less inclined to continue working on drawing than the control group.

“People are notorious for acting on emotion, then justifying with logic.”

When my wife and I discussed the possibility of making our children's allowance contingent on their completing the household chores, I felt hesitant. Would the extrinsic reward (or punishment, depending on how entitled to their allowance they felt) flip some switch in their head causing them to refuse to do chores in the future without payment?

With the Lepper, Greene and Nisbett study in mind I advocated not tying the children's allowance to the completion of their chores because, I argued, they should feel a sense of personal responsibility to keep their house clean. I was afraid once they were used to getting paid to keep the house clean they'd always expect it. I could see them as middle-aged women sitting in a filthy house wondering who was going to pay them to clean it.

Why all our motivational theories are wrong

While all of these studies on motivation are intriguing I'm not convinced they tell the whole story. We are complex creatures and are motivated by multiple factors. With all the forces influencing our decisions we never really decide on a course of action for just one reason. It is a combination of factors that cause us to act, not all of them rational. People are notorious for acting on emotion and then justifying with logic.

It may appear we are motivated by one thing--in fact we may claim to be motivated by only one thing--but how often have you questioned your motives in a critical way and determined, if you were honest with yourself, there were other factors motivating you? To assert there is only one motivation for each of our actions smacks of a simplified scenario which does not match reality. We are all motivated by both intrinsic and extrinsic factors in all our decisions.

The real value of these studies for me is the possibility there is a switching mechanism which causes us to disregard a previously powerful motivation. In the Gneezy and Rustichini daycare study, parents felt an obligation to arrive on time until a fine for lateness was imposed. The fine should have been additive and increased the likelihood they would arrive on time but instead it appears to have changed their motivation from an internal one to an external one.

“Time will tell what affect our efforts have had, but I see rays of sunshine.”

Whether it’s raising children, dealing with subordinates or analyzing our own behavior, understanding why people do the things they do is a major part of getting the results we want. While it’s tempting to simplify the situation and assign an “intrinsic” or “extrinsic” label, if we do we will have failed to see the beautiful complexity of the human condition.

In the end, we did not pay our children to do their chores but that does not mean we didn’t use extrinsic motivation. We charged them a fine for making us do their chores, we withheld privileges and gave them extra work sometimes. But we also tried to reinforce the idea we all pick up after each other in our house, it’s part of living in a community. We gave them the freedom to structure their own lives as much as possible and whenever we could, allowed natural consequences to occur.

Time will tell what affect our efforts have had, but I see a few rays of sunshine coming through the clouds and, for tonight at least, a clean kitchen.