Motivation in the 21st Century

Daniel Pink's book, Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, presents the findings of social science and explores the large gap between theory and practice in most of our organizational and daily life, at work, at school, and in the community. Most of the motivation we experience in these settings is external, carrot-and-stick motivation. Do this and get a nice bonus. Don't do that or you will be fired, failed, or fined.

But that type of external motivation does not work well for the most important parts of life anymore, as not only a large body of empirical evidence shows, but also our daily experience. Designing highly creative new products, learning complex new skills, or building meaningful relationships with loved ones, clients, or your community clearly are incompatible with carrot-and-stick behavior. External motivators actually reduce intrinsic motivation, lower performance, crush creativity, and encourage short-term thinking and unethical behavior (think Enron and AIG).

Pink moves from showing the limited cases where external motivation works well, such as highly routine, boring, rote chores, such as an assembly line to demonstrating how 21st century work, learning, and life now depends more on creative and passionate engagement. He cites Autonomy, Mastery, and Purpose as the key elements of intrinsic motivation, along with suggestions about how to re-tool our motivational systems.

Autonomy means that people want control over their own schedule.  They want the freedom to work how they want and when they want.  Mastery refers to people’s desire to immerse themselves in their craft and to get really, really good at it.  They want to develop expertise.  Purpose refers to some goal that is bigger than just a production schedule, meeting a quota, or hitting a deadline.  For many people, purpose refers to something that is larger than themselves that gives meaning to their lives, whether it is family, a community, or a cause.
Drive reads quickly, provokes thought, and provides some guidelines for improvement.  For teachers, it is helpful to remember that most of the traditional ideas of motivation always were limited in usefulness, and many are now worthless.

Negative Stereotypes Damage Learning

Negative stereotypes shown to affect learning, not just performance, a 2010 study finds.  This study, Stereotype Threat PreventsPerceptual Learning, goes beyond the very well documented classic work of Stanford’s Claude Steele.  He found that simply filling out a blank for “Race” on a subject test depressed the scores of African Americans.  Follow up studies found this effect true for women as well as different minorities on a variety of subject tests.  In addition, to depressed performance on subject tests, negative stereotypes depressed performance of stigmatized groups on physical skills such driving or golf putting. One interesting follow up stereotype study found that on math subject tests when Asian women were asked to identify their gender, their performance was depressed.  When they were asked to identify their ethnicity, however, their performance was increased.  

This study on perceptual learning investigated ability to learn precursor skills needed for higher order learning.  This finding takes the problem into the learning process itself, rather than just into task performance.  It may not be that stigmatized group only “choke” on tests when reminded of stereotypes; it may be that stigmatized groups fail to learn important fundamental skills that are prerequisite for learning to solve more complex problems.  The researchers, who were able to separate learning effects from performance effects, studied how stereotype threats affects women’s ability to learn math.  According to lead author Robert Rydell, "if women do not learn relatively simple skills early on, this could spell trouble for them later on when they need to combine a number of more simple skills in new, complicated ways to solve difficult problems. For example, if a young girl does not learn a relatively simple principle of algebra or how to divide fractions because she is experiencing threat, this may hurt her when she has to use those skills to complete problems on geometry, trigonometry, or calculus tests.  Bottom line:  stereotypes hurt.