Dr. Kentaro Fujita

Why am I doing what I'm doing?

And you could imagine with adults, if I'm really clear why I'm doing what I'm doing, that that confusion might be less likely to happen than if I'm not as clear about what I really, really love.

Now, I will say what I just said is very controversial and I'm sure the psychologists who are listening to this are going to be all up in arms about how that can't be true.

I think there are multiple theories about how intrinsic motivation works and I'm drawing for those expert readers.

expert listeners from the attributional approach.

And what matters here is the conclusions one draws from one's actions.

Why am I doing this?

Depending on how I answer that will dictate how my motivation flows.

If I'm doing it because I'm trying to get the extrinsic rewards, then it becomes extrinsically motivated and my motivation drops.

But you can imagine again with adults, those who really know that they love the thing and they're really certain they love the thing, they may be a little bit more resistant to that.

Yeah, it seems to me a little bit like just, I guess I mentioned before, like staying connected to the process, to the way that, you know, I used to do things.

I will say we have to be really careful, though, because I think this relationship between external rewards and intrinsic motivation can be exploited.

So there's some research suggests that when we know somebody loves the job,

we don't feel the need to pay them as much because we know they'll do the job anyway.

Whereas if you took two people, one who is intrinsically motivated and one who's extrinsically motivated, you have to pay the extrinsically motivated person a lot more money to do the same job than the person who's intrinsically motivated.

But it begs a lot of questions about fairness.

Should you really be paying two people different amount of money when they're doing exactly the same task just because they have differences in motivation?

And in some respects, you're almost rewarding the person that you probably don't want doing the job because they're just doing it for the money as opposed to they really love what they're doing.

I think a lot of employers would like to believe that they're – or like to have employees who are intrinsically motivated because people who are intrinsically motivated will often do the extra step.

They'll do the hard work.