Intrinsic Motivation

Overview

Intrinsic motivation is what an individual feels when they engage in an activity to derive intrinsically rewarding feelings from the activity itself, and not for any reward outside of the activity. People often spend long hours engaged in activities such as watching a history documentary, painting a mural, or mastering a particular tennis shot even when there is no clear reward awarded at the end of these activities. Rather, these activities incite certain internal states such as pleasure, relaxation, elimination of boredom or of cognitive dissonance (see also: cognitive dissonance), and feeling competent that they might consider rewarding. Csikszentmihalyi & Nakamura describe such an internal state as “autotelic” or having its goal within itself, or what they call the “flow experience” (see also: flow). In contrast to extrinsic motivation (see also: extrinsic motivation), an intrinsically motivated individual is considered to be a decisive entity who chooses to do specific things depending on their goals, feelings, and situation. According to Deci, intrinsic motivation is behavior that people engage in to feel competent and autonomous.

Intrinsic motivation is a valuable notion, especially in the context of education. According to Gottfried (as cited in Martinez), intrinsic motivation is positively correlated to academic achievement. It is also associated with creativity (Amabile, Hill, Hennessey, & Tighe, 1994) and meaningful learning. As Martinez states, “excellence and enjoyment coexist and are mutually reinforcing.” It is instrumental to sustain learning, in the sense that it is reinforcing. For example, if I am intrinsically motivated to learn a new watercolor painting technique, the more I practice, the better I get, and in turn, the more I am motivated to paint. I may want to keep learning how to perfect this technique or diversify to other techniques. I might even combine two techniques and create a unique technique of my own.

Evidence

Some of the earliest evidence to support intrinsic motivation actually comes from research on animal behavior that showed that exploration is an activity that reinforces itself, that is, it could be considered intrinsically motivated. Dashiell (1925) and Nissen (1930) demonstrated through their experiments on rats that the subjects endured electric shocks to explore novel stimuli in a maze (Deci, 1975).

In his research, deCharms (as cited in Csikszentmihalyi & Nakamura, 2014) found that school children who felt in control of their lives and had high intrinsic motivation, or Origins, as he called them, showed more accountability for their behavior and enjoyed it regardless of external rewards. In comparison, Pawns, or children who did not feel in control of their lives did not demonstrate such behavior.

Deci’s research (1971, 1975, as cited in Csikszentmihalyi & Nakamura, 2014) agreed with this hypothesis and showed that if people were given rewards such as money for things they enjoyed when this reward was taken away they lost interest in these activities faster than when there was no extrinsic reward involved.