The research behind Self-Determination Theory
In 1971, psychologist Edward Deci published a series of experiments investigating a question that seems, at first, to have an obvious answer: what happens when you start paying someone to do something they already enjoy?
We generally assume that adding a reward increases motivation. If you already like doing something and someone gives you an additional incentive to do it, you now have two reasons to continue. Deci was interested in whether it was actually that simple.
His research would eventually contribute to the development of Self-Determination Theory, now one of the major theories used to understand human motivation. The central idea is that motivation is not simply something we have more or less of. Where our motivation comes from matters too.
THE EXPERIMENT
In one of Deci's original laboratory experiments, 24 university students were brought in for three separate one-hour sessions and asked to work with Soma puzzles, a set of three-dimensional pieces that could be arranged into different configurations.
During the first session, participants worked on the puzzles without being paid. In the second, one group was offered $1 for every puzzle they successfully completed while a control group continued without payment. In the third session, the payment was removed and both groups once again worked on the puzzles without any financial incentive.
The clever part of the experiment happened during an eight-minute break. The researcher would leave the room and tell participants they were free to do whatever they wanted. They could continue working on the puzzles, read magazines or occupy themselves with something else in the room.
This gave Deci a way to observe what people did when there was no obvious external reason to continue. If someone voluntarily returned to the puzzles during their free time, it provided an indication that the activity itself still held some appeal.
As you would expect, paying people increased their motivation while the payment was available. The more interesting result came afterward. Once the financial reward disappeared, participants who had previously been paid spent less of their free-choice time working on the puzzles than they had before the reward was introduced.
Deci conducted two laboratory experiments and a field experiment as part of the original research. The results weren't identical across every condition, but they raised an important possibility: under some circumstances, introducing an external reward for an activity can reduce a person's subsequent intrinsic motivation to do it.
THE FINDING
This research is sometimes reduced online to the much broader claim that rewards destroy motivation. That isn't an accurate description of what Deci found or of the much larger body of research that followed.
Rewards clearly can motivate behavior. Salaries get people to work, prizes encourage competition and incentives can make otherwise unappealing tasks worth completing. The more interesting question is what a reward does to the reason we understand ourselves to be doing something.
Before being paid to solve the puzzles, a participant had a relatively straightforward explanation for their behavior: they were solving them because they wanted to. Once money was introduced, another explanation became available. They were now solving puzzles because they were being paid.
That distinction became part of a much larger body of work by Deci and psychologist Richard Ryan on intrinsic and extrinsic motivation.
Intrinsic motivation comes from the activity itself. You read a book because you're interested in it, play tennis because you enjoy playing or spend an afternoon learning about something because you genuinely want to understand it.
Extrinsic motivation comes from something separable from the activity. You work because you receive a salary, study because you want the qualification or complete a task because someone else expects you to.
But one of the important contributions of Self-Determination Theory is that it doesn't stop there. Deci and Ryan argue that extrinsic motivation itself varies considerably. Doing something because someone is forcing you is psychologically different from doing the same thing because you personally believe it is important.
That difference leads to the broader theory.
THE THEORY
Self-Determination Theory proposes that three basic psychological needs play an important role in motivation and well-being: autonomy, competence and relatedness.
Autonomy is the experience of having some ownership over your behavior. It does not mean complete independence or freedom from rules. You can willingly follow someone else's instructions and still experience autonomy. What matters is whether you feel that, at some level, you endorse what you are doing.
Competence is the experience of being capable and effective. We tend to engage differently when we can see ourselves learning, improving or successfully dealing with an appropriate level of challenge. An activity that feels completely beyond our abilities can become discouraging, while one that never requires anything from us can become boring.
Relatedness refers to our sense of connection with other people. The people surrounding an activity can become part of what makes us want to continue doing it. A job, class, sport or hobby can feel very different depending on whether we feel welcomed, respected and connected to the people involved.
Research within the Self-Determination Theory framework has now examined these needs across education, work, healthcare, relationships, exercise and sport. The theory proposes that environments that support autonomy, competence and relatedness tend to create better conditions for more self-directed forms of motivation and psychological well-being.
NOT THE SAME THING
Autonomy does not mean doing whatever you want
This is an important distinction because Self-Determination Theory can easily be mistaken for an argument that people should simply follow whatever they feel like doing.
It isn't.
Much of adult life involves things we would probably never do purely for enjoyment. Most people aren't intrinsically motivated to file taxes, answer administrative emails or clean a bathroom. Yet there is still a meaningful difference between doing something solely because you feel pressured and doing it because you understand and accept the reason it needs to be done.
Consider two people who exercise regularly. One does it primarily because missing a workout produces guilt and anxiety. The other doesn't particularly enjoy every workout either, but values being strong and maintaining their health.
From the outside, their behavior might be identical. Both show up four times a week and complete the same exercises. Self-Determination Theory is interested in the fact that the motivation underneath those behaviors is different.
Deci and Ryan describe a process through which external motivations can become increasingly internalized. Something can move from I am doing this because someone is making me towards I am doing this because I understand why it matters to me.
The activity never has to become fun. The reason for doing it has simply become more fully your own.
WHY IT MATTERS
This gives us a more useful way to think about motivation than simply asking whether we have enough of it.
We often describe ourselves as motivated or unmotivated as though motivation were a relatively stable personal resource. When we struggle to do something, the obvious solution is usually to demand more discipline from ourselves.
Self-Determination Theory suggests that it can also be useful to examine the conditions surrounding the behavior.
You can see this particularly clearly when something you once enjoyed begins to feel different. Someone may love writing, for example, then begin publishing their work online. Over time, views, followers, comments, deadlines and income become attached to the activity. None of those things are inherently harmful, and they may create opportunities the writer genuinely values. But they can also change the motivational environment around writing.
The original question, What do I want to write?, can gradually become What will perform well?
This does not mean that metrics have somehow destroyed the person's creativity. It means there are now more forces influencing why the person writes.
The same thing can happen when a hobby becomes a job, when exercise becomes primarily about numbers or when learning becomes primarily about grades. External measures can be useful, but they can also begin to crowd an activity with incentives and pressures that weren't originally there.
Self-Determination Theory gives us a way to notice that change without concluding that rewards, goals or external expectations are inherently bad.
The question becomes more specific: What is currently driving this behavior and how does that affect my experience of doing it?
TRY THIS
Think of something you keep telling yourself you need to be more motivated to do. Before assuming that the answer is greater discipline, look at it through the three needs identified by Self-Determination Theory.
Start with autonomy. Why are you doing this in the first place? Is the reason personally meaningful to you or are you mostly responding to pressure, guilt or somebody else's expectations?
Then look at competence. Do you know what you're doing and can you see evidence that you're improving? Is the challenge appropriate for your current ability or have you created a task that feels so difficult that progress is hard to detect?
Finally, consider relatedness. Who is around you while you're doing this? Is there anyone you can learn from, work alongside or share the experience with? Would the activity feel different if it were connected to people you actually enjoyed being around?
None of these questions guarantees motivation. Sometimes something simply needs to be done whether you feel motivated or not.
But they can help identify why motivation that once came relatively easily has become harder to find.
And that is one of the most useful contributions of Self-Determination Theory: instead of treating motivation as a character trait, it gives us a way to examine what is motivating us and the conditions in which that motivation is taking place.
References
Deci, E. L. (1971). Effects of externally mediated rewards on intrinsic motivation. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 18(1), 105-115.
Deci, E. L., & Ryan, R. M. (2000). The "what" and "why" of goal pursuits: Human needs and the self-determination of behavior. Psychological Inquiry, 11(4), 227-268.
Ryan, R. M., & Deci, E. L. (2017). Self-Determination Theory: Basic Psychological Needs in Motivation, Development, and Wellness. Guilford Press.