Ayelet Fishbach

It might be energizing.

And the more I feel like doing the thing is an end in itself, the more motivated people are going to be.

Now, let me also add that this is not intuitive for people.

I mentioned that when we asked people to choose between two activities, they went for the activity that paid more and not for the one that they were more likely to enjoy and actually stick at that job later.

We see that there are two mispredictions.

People think that

Other people don't care about intrinsic motivation as much as they do, and they think that they themselves will not care about intrinsic motivation as much as they end up caring.

And that can explain a lot of the professional choices that we make that are not ideal, that

Now, choosing the wrong workout regimen, the wrong healthy diet for ourselves, because we don't quite appreciate how important it is to choose something that is not only a means to an end, but also feels like the end by itself.

So let me first say that I don't say that there is not much in negative feedback.

There is.

There are important lessons in negative feedback.

However, it's hard to learn those lessons.

And it's hard first because emotionally negative feedback feels bad.

So we disengage.

We tune out.

In one of the studies that we ran, we found that

People don't remember the feedback and don't even remember the answer when it's negative.

They just disengage with the task.

They don't learn.