Decades of research and experience shows that when people are motivated, they learn quicker, they perform better, their creativity is boosted, and their psychological well-being is enhanced. All good things.
Consequently, it’s understandable that we want our kids to be motivated. If they’re motivated to get an A, they’ll do their homework and learn what they need to do well on the test. If they’re motivated to play basketball, they will practice more and become the star player. If they’re motivated to have a tidy room, they will pack up after themselves, and we won’t be dreading what the state of their house will be like when they move out.
The issue arises when we try to motivate them. We might offer rewards for doing well at school, or heap praise on them after each basketball game, or promise that they can go to the party once their room is tidy. But these approaches don’t work in the way we want them to.
It’s true that rewards and praise increase motivation. Or rather, they increase extrinsic motivation, which is when people are driven to engage in an activity to obtain a tangible consequence, such as money, food, social acceptance, or even to avoid a punishment. And it’s true that extrinsic motivation works… if what we mean by ‘works’ is that it secures temporary compliance. Yes, they’ll learn the curriculum, but they’ll forget it as soon as they’ve done the test. Yes, they’ll practice basketball, but only for as long as the praise is effusive enough. Yes, they’ll pick up their stuff, but their room will be messy again as soon as they’ve come home from the party.
See, there’s something I left out of my opening paragraph. The research shows that when people are intrinsically motivated, they learn quicker, they perform better, their creativity is boosted, and their psychological well-being is enhanced.
Unfortunately, the tools we normally employ to increase motivation – such as rewards and praise – actually serve to undermine intrinsic motivation. This means that, while offering an extrinsic motivator may ‘work’ in the short term to secure compliance, in the long-term we’re inhibiting learning, decreasing performance, thwarting creativity, and impeding psychological well-being.
The issue that many parents, coaches, teachers, and employers have is that it’s incredibly difficult to conceptualise how to support someone’s intrinsic motivation. Threatening a punishment, proffering a reward, and spouting out “good job” are all comparatively easy and immediate. There’s also the belief that motivation is additive – that is you can offer an extrinsic motivator and it will only add to the intrinsic motivation they already feel or may be the boost they need to get going and develop their own intrinsic motivation. Finally, there’s the belief that some motivation is better than none at all, so extrinsic motivators are applied to guarantee a level of motivation.
Yet Alfie Kohn (who in many regards wrote the literal book on human motivation) wrote:
“What matters is not how motivated someone is, but how someone is motivated.”
He further explains that even large amounts of extrinsic motivation do not support the goals that matter. Yet that statement was written 30 years ago. Does the current state of research back up Kohn’s stance on motivation? To find out, there are a few questions we should consider: 1. Is there a legitimate distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation? 2. How do these types of motivation interact? and 3. Is intrinsic motivation truly superior to extrinsic motivation?
To find the answers, we’re first going to travel into the brain’s dopamine system, and then across both Asia and Africa on a pair of months-long ultramarathons.
The neuroscience of motivation
Dopamine could well be the most maligned neurotransmitter in the human brain. Due to its role in the reward circuitry of our brains, there are some who have gone so far as to suggest a dopamine detox (cutting out the constant stimulation from social media, internet gaming, or even eating), in order to reset the brain’s sensitivity to rewards and discourage unhealthy habits. Yet dopamine doesn’t just drive us to scroll Facebook indefinitely or watch too many TikTok videos. It drives motivation, and with low dopamine you’d be prone to feeling unenergetic, a lack of interest in normal and pleasurable activities, and even depression… in short, you’d be unmotivated. (You’d also have muscle tremors, sleep difficulties, and digestive issues, so things would be bad all round).
Dopamine is released by only a small group of neurons (brain cells), which are clustered in the midbrain. When information about a reward goes into the neural circuitry in the midbrain (the Ventral Tegmental Area in particular, or VTA), dopamine is released by these neurons. However the dopamine doesn’t stay in the midbrain. Because these neurons have long axons, they communicate with neurons throughout the brain, which in turn coordinate the response to the reward, making it more or less likely that we will repeat the action that led to the rewarding event, or do the action that we think will lead to the reward.
What’s really interesting is how the information about the rewards gets into the midbrain in the first place. It turns out that there isn’t just one source of input, but that there are multiple ways for information about rewards to get into the midbrain. Notably, these modes of input differ depending on whether we are talking about intrinsic or extrinsic motivators.
In one pioneering study, researchers looked at the patterns of activity happening in the brains of participants when they imagined doing an intrinsically motivated activity (such as working because it’s fun), and compared it to the pattern of activity when they imagined doing an extrinsically motivated activity (such as working for money). They found that the intrinsic motivator activated the insular cortex more than the extrinsically motivated activity, while the extrinsic motivator activated the posterior cingulate cortex (PCC) to a greater extent. While both the insular cortex and the posterior cingulate cortex feed into the dopamine system at the midbrain, their functions are very different.
The insular cortex is involved in emotional processing and is part of the limbic system, or to greatly simplify things, the ‘feeling’ part of the brain. In contrast, the PCC forms part of the cerebral cortex, or ‘thinking’ part of the brain. It forms part of the valuation system, weighing the subjective value of rewards to inform decision making. In short, when we plan to do something based on the intrinsic reward, we’re acting based on what we feel will be inherently satisfying, making a sort of ‘gut-feeling’ decision. On the other hand, extrinsic motivators activate the thinking part of our brains, leading us to make calculated cost-benefit analyses before deciding if the reward is worth the effort.
So question 1 is answered – our brains can tell the difference between intrinsic and extrinsic motivators. Now, how do these motivators interact?
In his book, Kohn cites a wealth of studies demonstrating the undermining effect of rewards. He shows time and time again that when children are rewarded for a certain behaviour, they will do that behaviour to get the reward. But once the reward is taken away, they are likely to stop doing the behaviour. In fact, they are even less likely to do the behaviour now than if no reward had ever been offered. Extrinsic motivators undermine people’s willingness to engage in an activity that they otherwise might have enjoyed.
Yet these were all behavioural studies, telling us much about how behaviour is affected by rewards, but little about what is going on inside the brain at the time. Fortunately for us, we now have research demonstrating the neural basis of this effect.
Researchers replicated the undermining effect of rewards using what they called a stopwatch task. Participants were given points for stopping a stopwatch between 4.95 and 5.05 seconds, a task that is challenging enough that people find it intrinsically satisfying. However, what made this study different was that the participants did this task while they were having their brains scanned using functional magnetic resonance imaging (which measures the patterns of brain activity that happen during a task).
The participants were split into two groups, one which originally received a reward for succeeding on the stopwatch task, and one that didn’t receive a reward. They then had an opportunity to freely play the stopwatch task while they ‘waited’ for the second round of the experiment, in which they completed the same task with neither group receiving a reward. Unsurprisingly, the experimenters found evidence of the behavioural undermining effect, wherein participants who were rewarded for success on the stopwatch task played significantly less times during the opportunity for free play than those in the control group who received no reward.
When examining the patterns of brain activity, they found that the striatum (one of the targets of the dopamine releasing neurons of the VTA) and the midbrain were significantly activated in both groups during the first session, indicating that the activity was intrinsically rewarding. However, the reward group showed greater levels of activity, indicating that neural activity in these regions was enhanced by the promise of a reward. Yet when we look at the second session, where the same task was completed without a reward, we see that the brain activations between groups diverge. While the patterns of activation were unchanged for the control group, those who were no longer receiving a reward showed less activation in the striatum and the midbrain. By using some (complicated) maths, they were able to derive what they called a “neural undermining index”, which had a large significant interaction with the amount of voluntary play on the stopwatch task during the free play time. In essence, this showed that those with less neural activity in these regions were those who were less likely to play the stopwatch task voluntarily.
This study indicates that the behavioural undermining effect (less spontaneous engagement with a task after a reward is offered) is reflecting a neural undermining effect. They postulated that “the strong incentive value of monetary reward pushed down the intrinsic value of task success. As a result, when the monetary reward was no longer promised, the intrinsic task value was underestimated, resulting in decreased motivation relative to the control group.”
So we now have an answer to our second question – extrinsic motivators inhibit intrinsic motivation.
The Hardest Geezer
By now, hopefully you’re getting the point that extrinsic motivators do more harm than good. They encourage participation, but only for as long as the reward is offered and kill intrinsic motivation in the process. But for a deep look at what someone can do with just intrinsic motivation, I’d like to introduce you to Russ Cook, aka The Hardest Geezer.
Russ recently became the first person to run from the southernmost point of Africa to the northernmost point, a journey that took 352 days, 16000 km, and crossed 16 countries. It also entailed being robbed at gunpoint, peeing blood, and being kidnapped by men with machetes. While the machetes were new, Russ was no stranger to the physical hardships of ultramarathons, having run from Istanbul to London without a support crew a few years earlier. He ran the equivalent of 73 marathons in 68 days, carrying just a hammock, toothbrush, water bottle, battery pack, and soap in his backpack, and using Google Maps to plan out his route along the way.
What drives someone to achieve a goal of this magnitude? For most people, being kidnapped would seem like reasonable grounds to honourably quit a challenge like this.
Well, it wasn’t extrinsic motivation that had him lacing on his running shoes over blistered and bloody feet. While he had the goal of raising £1 million pounds for two charities while he completed his African run, his run across Asia was without a support crew and only a small social media following – he wasn’t accountable to anyone and could have quit at any point. It wasn’t because he had parents pushing him to achieve something great – he had barely had any contact with them from the age of 17. By all accounts, before his first ultramarathon, Russ didn’t seem like the person who would achieve much in life at all; he was struggling with a gambling addiction, binge drinking, overweight and entirely miserable.
Then a friend invited him to run a half-marathon. There was no reward for doing it. No punishment if he didn’t. But that invitation sparked something within him, and that initial half-marathon was followed by a full marathon, and then his ultra-marathon across Asia.
In an interview with Artefact magazine, he said, “I did this for my own personal sense of achievement. I’ve got some mad stories to tell and I have done something no one else has done which makes me feel proud.” So what drove the Hardest Geezer? An uncommon amount of intrinsic motivation.
How to encourage internal motivation
If you want to stop your child reading for pleasure, offer them a reward for each book they finish. If you want your child to get good grades but hate learning, pay them for the As on their report card. If you want to stifle your child’s creativity, praise them effusively for each artwork they produce.
But if you want your child to succeed in life, finding joy and satisfaction in the things they choose to work towards, we need to step away from trying to externally motivate them.
How? Kohn suggests a few things, and they map nicely onto the Basic Psychological Needs (BPN) proposed by Self-Determination Theory, which I have touched on before.
Choice
Choice is linked to the BPN of autonomy. In order to be truly intrinsically motivated, children (and adults) need to be able to choose their own adventure. When they’re younger, that may look like choosing between a range of acceptable alternatives (like choosing between eating a carrot or a cucumber, with the expectation that they will choose a vegetable to eat with dinner). But as they grow older and more responsible, we should be allowing them an ever-greater amount of freedom in the choices they make. This does not mean that they have free reign without limits; boundaries are necessary to help us feel safer (if you’re not sure what I mean by that, imagine driving over a bridge without guard rails). But it does mean giving them as much freedom as possible within the boundaries.
Importantly, this doesn’t just mean giving them freedom only when they’re choosing what we want them to choose. It means supporting them even when they make decisions that run counter to what we want or think is best for them. It means trusting them enough to stop controlling them.
Content
This maps onto the BPN of competence. If our children are going to be motivated to do something, they need to be presented with tasks and opportunities that are not too easy (because that leads to boredom), and that are not too hard (because that feels overwhelming). They need to have the opportunity to reach a level of competence in the things they do. In practice, this means that the rules, boundaries and expectations we set for our children need to be appropriate for their development stage. It also means continually re-evaluating the rules as our children grow older – while it’s dangerous for a 2 year old to ride around the block alone, we might find that our 5 year old is ready for that level of responsibility. When things are just-the-right-amount of challenging, curiosity is activated, and satisfying curiosity is inherently satisfying.
Collaboration
Collaboration relies on the BPN of relatedness. It involves helping our children feel connected to us and lets them know that they can rely on us for help and guidance. Collaboration involves guiding them to succeed in the challenges they have taken on, problem solving together when things aren’t going well, and generally understanding that things work better when we work together.
The big reframe
If your question is, ‘How can I get my child to do their homework?’, you’re asking the wrong question. If you’re asking, ‘How can I get my child to practice basketball?’, or ‘How can I make my child clean their room?’, the only answer is to turn to extrinsic motivators. These questions are framed around control – manipulating our child to do the things that we think are important.
If we want our children to succeed, we need to ask different questions.
‘How can I support my child to pursue a career they are deeply passionate about?’ might lead us to realise that they don’t need straight As because they want to be a hairdresser. We might even support them when they choose to drop out of school and work with them to find a course that they are interested.
‘How can I help my child achieve their best?’ might lead us to see what success looks like to them. By talking with our kid, we might realise that they do really like basketball, but they’re finding it too competitive. Together, you might look for a club that isn’t as competitive and focuses more on skill-building and fun.
‘Does it really matter that my teenager has a tidy room?’ might lead us to see that, no, it doesn’t really matter. Together, we might set a reasonable expectation, for example, that they need to take dirty dishes out of their room and are responsible for doing their own washing. But we might decide that it’s ok to let the rest go.
In sum:
“What matters is not how motivated someone is, but how someone is motivated.”
Let’s stop relying on extrinsic motivators to do an ineffectual job.
I'd love to hear your thoughts! Did you enjoy learning about the neuroscience behind motivation? Are you also hoping that Russ Cook decides to run across your continent next?
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I've always believed that motivation is key, but this post really opened my eyes to the different types of motivation and how they impact our kids. It's not just about rewards and praise, but about fostering intrinsic motivation for long-term success. Excellent work! 👏🏼