I read a review on Freakonomics written by my economist friend Arya Gaduh a while ago. But only recently I finished reading this interesting and highly entertaining book [1] by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner. Among many things that could be discussed in relation to creativity, the one that I would like to bring up in this posting is the claim that most people are driven by incentives, be it in the form of financial, social, and/or moral reward. How would this in relation with learning? What are the incentives to learn?
Within school setting, the reason why students perform is without a doubt to get good grades. Yet, there’s a danger to stop here, for the reason that once school (or class) is over, the motivation to learn would stop accordingly. This may explain the lack of motivation I encountered in my ex-students as mentioned in this posting.
Getting good grades may bring praise and admiration from teachers and peers alike. For some, getting good grades may even bring financial rewards – be it from their own parents or to get/ maintain scholarship. Yet, these rewards leave us with the dilemma of having external instead of internal motivators to learning. Externally-motivated learning is more or less controlled by other people, which would most probably stop when the external motivator is no longer monitoring the learning process (and product).
If we extend the motivation to get good grades to getting social and moral rewards, we may get longer-lasting result – albeit still externally-motivated. So what must we do to instill intrinsic motivation to learn? Nothing much perhaps, because intrinsic motivation is processed within a person. But getting social and moral rewards will bring with it a sense of pride, and most likely the personal joy of what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi called flow – that special feeling of personal satisfaction when we are so immerse in the process of doing something we really enjoy.
In the scheme of incentives-driven world of economics, I’m not sure where this ‘personal incentive’ would fit in. But it is this ‘personal incentive’ that will keep the desire to learn burning within us – even long after school is over.
Note
[1] Trust me, before I read Freakonomics, I wouldn’t put the word economics in the same sentence with interesting and entertaining! No offense to all economists in the world :)
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8 comments:
Philosophers call it homo ludens -- the playful nature of humans. Now, if we can exploit this, maybe you might get your internal incentive to learn.
Economists call human nature and internal incentives "preferences". We take preferences as given and design our social/financial incentives around it.
Economists will then try to figure out which "internal incentives" dominate, and design the "external incentives" around them to achieve an objective -- which might well include a change in children's preferences.
But, hey, what do I know? I'm just a visitor here ;-).
We educators would like to think we could affect what you economists call preferences without giving external incentives. What you're saying is that external incentives should come before preferences. Maybe that's where the misalignment :)
Dew,
I didn't say that. What I said was that preferences were built in. Outsiders don't make me prefer chocolate over cheese, or playing over learning.
You educators try to affect these preferences -- e.g., by designing curricula in such a way that learning feels like playing.
When you decided to "make learning feel like playing", you are controlling the external incentives. The internal ones (whether the kid "falls" for your "trick") are outside your power.
Nobody -- and I mean, nobody -- can change other people's internal incentives directly (except if you're Professor X or Jean Grey/Phoenix from the X-Men). You can only affect external incentives.
Whether they manage to influence preferences, now that's another question.
What I meant by "external incentives should come before preferences" was that preferences can't be changed by external incentives.
But then again, it seems that your definition of external incentives are not exactly the same with my definition of external motivation (which often come in the form of punishment and visible reward).
Your "make learning feel like playing" is a personal reward/ incentive in my definition. And I agree, nobody can change one's intrinsic motivation.
But what you're saying is that there *is* personal incentive! - I wasn't sure if economist believe in such a thing! :)
Dew,
For economists, all incentives are personal. The 'classification' made by Levitt-Dubner -- moral, social, financial -- relates to their form.
"I didn't say that. What I said was that preferences were built in. Outsiders don't make me prefer chocolate over cheese, or playing over learning."
Arya, what about advertising? Surely that can manipulate internal motivation somewhat :)
A friend of mine did her thesis on internal and external motivation in communist and capitalist countries. What's interesting is that there is/was relatively little external motivation in communist countries, so you do what you enjoy doing rather than doing whatever pays the mortgage no matter how boring it is. In many ways it's a nicer way of doing things, and you can imagine that people would do much better work under such systems.
John,
In the light of this debate, it would be interesting to see revisit how internal vs. external motivation/ preferences can be changed (or not)... :)
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