Psychology 352 – Motivation

Chapter 5 – Intrinsic Motivation and Types of Extrinsic Motivation

• How can external events generate motivational states?
• The motivation for the behavior comes from wanting the incentive.
• There are two ways to enjoy an activity:
  • Intrinsically
  • Extrinsically
• Intrinsic Motivation – the innate propensity to engage one’s interests and to exercise one’s capacities, and thereby seeking out and mastering optimal challenges
  • Psychological needs
• Extrinsic Motivation – an environmentally created reason to initiate or persist in an action

Types of Extrinsic Motivation: Incentives and Consequences

• Operant Conditioning – the process by which a person learns how to operate effectively in the environment.
  • Stimulus: Response  Consequence
  • Hungry – Get food  Positive consequence or negative
• Incentives – an environmental event that attracts or repels a person toward or away from initiating a particular course of action.
  •  Always precede behavior
  • Positive incentives – cue approach behavior
  • Negative incentives – cue avoidance behavior
  • Consequences – follow behavior and increase or decrease the persistence of behavior
• What is a Reinforcer?
  • Any extrinsic event that increases behavior
  • Challenges
    • Knowing ahead of time what will work
    • Being able to explain why the reinforcer works
• What is a positive reinforcer?
  • Stimulus that decreases drive
  • Stimulus that decreases arousal
  • Stimulus that increases arousal
  • Attractive environmental object
  • Hedonically pleasurable brain stimulation
  • Opportunity to perform a high-frequency behavior
    Consequences
• Positive Reinforcers
  • Any environmental stimulus that, when presented, increases the future probability of the desired behavior
• Negative Reinforcers
  • Any environmental stimulus that, when removed, increases the future probability of the desired behavior
  • Motivate escape and avoidance behaviors
• Punishers
  • Any environmental stimulus that, when presented, decreases the future probability of the undesired behavior. The goal of any type of punishment is to decrease the behavior that it follows. In the case of positive punishment, it involves presenting an unfavorable outcome or event following an undesirable behavior
  • Decrease undesirable behavior
  • Negative punishers
    • Involve administering some aversive stimulus for suppressing future behavior. (Stay past curfew, grounded, jail, time out)
  • Positive punishers
    • Involve removing positive consequences for suppressing future behavior. (losing a personal resource; )
  • Do they work?
    • Unintentional side effects

Hidden Costs of Reward

• Why do people give rewards?
  • Providing an extrinsic reward for an intrinsically interesting activity often has a negative effect on future intrinsic motivation.
• Two factors explain which types of rewards decrease intrinsic motivation:
  • Expected Rewards – undermine intrinsic motivation
  • Tangible Rewards – tend to decrease intrinsic motivation
• Implications
  • Unexpected rewards
  • Verbal rewards

Benefits of Incentives and Rewards

• 4 Reasons not to use Extrinsic Motivation
  • Undermine the quality of performance and interfere with the process of learning
  • Distracts attention away from asking the question of why another person is being asked to do an uninteresting task
  • There are better ways to encourage participation
  • Undermine the individual’s long-term capacity for autonomous self-regulation

Cognitive Evaluation Theory

• Cognitive Evaluation Theory – all external events have both a controlling aspect and an informational aspect
• Three Propositions (Box 5)
  • External events that promote an internal perceived locus of causality promote intrinsic motivation
  • Events that increase perceived competence promote intrinsic motivation
  • The relative salience of whether an event is mostly controlling or mostly informational determines its effects on intrinsic and extrinsic motivation
• Examples of Controlling and Informational Events
  • Praise – functions as an extrinsic event sometimes to control another’s behavior
    • Sometimes to inform his/her competence about a job well done
  • Competition – decreases intrinsic motivation because competitors care relatively little about the task itself
    • both competence and autonomy must be high

Benefits of Facilitating Intrinsic Motivation

• Persistence
  • The higher a person’s intrinsic motivation, the greater will be his/her persistence on that task
• Creativity
  • Intrinsic motivation enhances creativity
• Conceptual Understanding
  • When intrinsic motivation is high, learners show a greater flexibility in their thinking
• Subjective Well-being
  • When you pursue goals that reflect intrinsic motivation, you experience optimal functioning

Self-Determination Theory

• Three types of motivation exist:
• Amotivation
  • Without motivation
• Extrinsic motivation – 4 types
  • External regulation – not at all self-determined (you do something to obtain a reward)
  • Introjected regulation – somewhat self-determined (guilt, shoulds, not truly accepting something within you)
  • Identified regulation – mostly self-determined (useful, valuable to you)
  • Integrated regulation – fully self-determined
• Intrinsic motivation
  • Your full acceptance of self-determination
  • All your psychological needs generate a motivation to act

Motivating Others

• Motivating Others On Uninteresting Activities
  • First solution – incentive
  • Rationale
  • Use autonomy-supportive conditions
  • Administer incentives and consequences that are information and promotes competence.