When I was in university, there were many topics that I was excited to learn about, some more than others, of course. But occasionally I'd be in a class or I'd get an assignment that, frankly, I had minimal interest in, never zero, but minimal interest. And as a way of dealing with that, I embarked on a process of literally lying to myself and just telling myself, "Okay, I'm super interested in reading this and I'm going to force myself to be interested in reading it." Lo and behold, I would start falling in love with certain things.

Maybe it was even the arrival of a word that I didn't recognize. And then I would go look it up and I knew I was studying for the GRE at that time, so I filed that away. I still have my notebooks of all the vocabulary words that I learned in the course of my university courses that, frankly, made the verbal portion of the GRE pretty easy, which if you ever try and study for that at the end, it's pretty tough to commit all those new words to memory and context.

So, I could find little hooks and through those hooks, I could kind of ratchet my way into a larger interest. And then, lo and behold, I'm really interested in Greek mythology, or I actually liked that one at first, but I didn't have to trick myself. But maybe we could spend a little bit of time talking about what is true intrinsic motivation?

Is it always reflexive? Can we make ourselves intrinsically motivated about a given topic or scenario or a group of people? And then let's talk about how intrinsic motivation links to performance, because there's a rich literature on this, as I recall, and I remember, you know, the Stanford study of rewarding kids for things they were already intrinsically motivated to do, maybe we could touch on that a little bit and remind people who haven't heard about it.

But I'm fascinated by this topic because I feel like so much of life is about doing things that initially we don't feel that excited to do, and yet succeeding in life, you know, until you can afford to offload your administrative work to somebody else, which hopefully by now you have.

To find a way to get it done. Right. This is fundamental to being a functional human being, frankly. Not just successful in air quotes, but functional. We got to do stuff that we don't enjoy doing. Yeah. So, I think we can talk about a couple of different ways to nurture intrinsic motivation.

We can think about how the task itself is designed, we can think about reward systems, and then we can think about also the things we say to ourselves and others, which I hope are not lies, but rather persuasive attempts. Let's start on that one, actually. I don't know a lot of people who are that good at deliberate self-deception.

Well, I like to think it was only around a particular set of goal-motivated pursuits. But at that time for me also it was survival. As I mentioned, I didn't do well in high school. I really wanted to perform well in university. But I knew that working just for the grade wasn't going to carry me.

It felt catabolic. And I don't know, maybe at that age I was still in the window of heightened neuroplasticity. We know it never closes. But I think I also fell in love with the process of learning how to do what I just described. Yeah. So, I think for most people the best method of self-persuasion is actually to convince somebody else.

So, I'm thinking of Eliot Aronson's classic research on cognitive dissonance, where he would ask you to go and tell somebody else a task you hated is really interesting. And if he paid you a lot to do it, you still hated the task because you had a justification. Like, I got 20 bucks to kind of fib a little bit about this task.

You know, the task is bad, but I did it for the payment. When he paid you $1 to go and tell somebody that you loved a task that you didn't, you ended up liking it more. Wow. And maybe I shouldn't be surprised, but maybe you should tell me why I shouldn't be surprised.

Because I hope people got what you just said very clearly. If they didn't – if you don't like doing something, going and reporting to somebody else how great that thing is, so lying about it to somebody else, is one way to increase the degree to which you like or enjoy that behavior or topic.

And if you're paid $20 to go lie to somebody in the positive direction, so against your true belief, it's less effective in shifting your underlying affect about that thing, your emotions, than if you're paid less. Correct? Yeah, exactly. Now, I think obviously in the experiment, lying was an easy way to show the effect.

But in real life, I think the way that you want to apply this is to say, all right, I've got to find something about this task that's interesting to me. And then in the process of explaining it to somebody else, I'm going to convince myself because I'm hearing the argument from somebody I already like and trust.

I've also chosen – I've chosen the reasons that I find compelling as opposed to hearing somebody else's reasons. And so I think this goes to the point that you were making, which is if you're trying to find a hook to make a topic intriguing, you've got to figure out, okay, what is it that would make this fascinating to me?

And in a lot of cases, what you're looking for is a curiosity gap. I think social scientists like to talk about curiosity as an itch that you have to scratch. So there's something you want to know, and you don't know it yet. So I would say – I tell my students often, like, take your least favorite class and find a mystery or a puzzle, like, something that you just do not know the answer to.

Like, I actually have talked with our kids about this, like, what really happened to King Tut? Do you know? Can you get to the bottom of that? And all of a sudden, you're like, "I wonder. I need to Google it, and then I need to see if Wikipedia has credible information on this." And the more you learn about that, the more intriguing it becomes.

And I think that's the beginning of the process of finding intrinsic motivation. Aaron Powell I see. So inherent in your answer is the idea that there's something wired into our neural circuits and therefore psychology that curiosity as a verb, the act of being curious and seeking information where – well, and I should say, I define curiosity – and hopefully, you'll disagree with me or agree either way.

It doesn't matter as long as we can get a bit deeper understanding. I define curiosity as a desire to find something out where you are not attached to a particular outcome. Yes. Is that right? Yeah. In psychology, it's typically defined as just wanting to know. And that means you're driven by the question, not a particular answer, which is exactly what you're driving at.

Aaron Powell Okay, great. And I think it was Dorothy Parker that said, "The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity." Kevin Vallier As there shouldn't be a cure for curiosity. Aaron Powell Right. So – and by the way, folks, we don't know what neural circuits subserve curiosity in the brain.

It's got to be a distributed network. There's no brain area for curiosity, but it's got to be linked up with the reward systems of dopamine, et cetera, in some way because when one discovers something new that satisfies some curiosity, it's clearly there's an internal reward there. Okay, let me back up.

So if your child or an adult is dreading working, exploring a topic or going about an assignment of any kind, you will give them a question that they then need to resolve. What if the assignment is like rake the leaves off the front lawn? Do you say, you know, count the leaves or – I mean, how does one get past the sort of procrastination and generate some intrinsic motivation for things that one dreads where it's unlikely that they're going to discover some knowledge that's exceedingly useful for the – for future?

Kevin Vallier You always start with, okay, what's the first experiment I can run? Find the most interesting looking leaf or your favorite leaf, and then that lasts for about two minutes. And okay, now what? We still have a lot of leaves there. Aaron Powell Right. So I think not all tasks can be made intrinsically motivating to everyone.

And so when intrinsic motivation is difficult to find, what you want to substitute with is a sense of purpose. Maybe a better way to say that is when the process is not interesting to you, you need to find a meaningful outcome. So there's some research on the boring but important effect where kids who have a purpose for learning – this goes through high school – and think, you know, this is not just interesting to me, but I'm going to be able to use this knowledge to help other people one day.

They're more persistent in their studying, they end up getting better grades. And so I think intrinsic motivation is often driven by curiosity about the how. A sense of purpose comes from really thinking hard about the why. Why does this matter? And so I'd say with the raking leaves, let's try to connect that task to something else that you care about.

Are you going to pleasantly surprise your parents when they get home? Are you going to have a place to play soccer that you didn't before? And I think then the process of getting to that – I guess what I'd say is if you're trying to motivate yourself, it's a little bit harder than if you're trying to motivate somebody else on this.

If I was going to motivate somebody else, I would take a page out of the motivational interviewing playbook where I would say, okay, Andrew, actually, let's play this out for a second. So you're going to rake a pile of leaves. It's a two-hour task. Zero to ten, how excited are you about that?

A three. Three? Really? Mm-hmm. I'm surprised. I thought you were going to say zero or one. Mm-hmm. Why is it not lower? I like any sort of physical activity because it allows me to move and I just like moving my body. There we go. Okay. So you just identified a potential source of purpose for that activity.

And I don't have a vested interest in convincing you to do this task. I am genuinely curious about what would motivate you to want to do it. And as you start to articulate it, boom, self-persuasion kicks in. Love it. I'm going to start using these approaches. Try it at your own risk.

I have a question about extrinsic motivation. So if we grow up being incentivized by extrinsic things, you know, you'll get your allowance if you blank. You can spend the money that you make on your paper route doing the things you really want to do. Is there any value in those kinds of learning-based incentives for kids and for adults?

Because I mean, that's the real world as well. I know plenty of people. I have family members that only work for a paycheck and they're pretty okay because they like spending their paycheck. I mean, I'm not intrinsically attached to money. I mean, I certainly have needs in life, but I don't enjoy spending money for the sake of spending it or for gaining more possessions.

But I know people that do, and I certainly don't judge. Are they somehow existing in a diminished landscape of happiness? Because they seem pretty happy to me. But they seem to have also worked out this relationship. They do certain things to get the extrinsic rewards, and they really enjoy what they can do with those extrinsic rewards.

So there's a huge body of evidence on what are the effects of extrinsic rewards on motivation and performance. And I think the latest conclusions, if you look at the latest meta-analyses, so a huge study of studies trying to accumulate what's the average effect of adding a financial incentive to a task that wasn't incentivized before or to a job where you were paid salary and now we're going to give you incentive compensation.

There is a boost. So in general, people are more productive when they're incentivized for their output. But these incentives are better for motivating quantity than quality. So you see people get more done, but they're not necessarily more careful or more thorough. Are they less careful and less thorough? No.

Actually, there's still positive effects on average. They're just weaker. And of course, you could then start to say, well, how do I incentivize being fast and careful? But I think where we do have to be really cautious is there's an undermining effect of extrinsic rewards on intrinsic motivation. And you were alluding to this earlier, dating back to the early '70s, where we know that if we take an interesting task and then we pay you for it, you might conclude that you're only doing it for the outcome and you lose interest in the task.

So the classic demonstration, Mark Lepper and colleagues, is kids playing video games. And they're playing them because they're fun. And then you start to add in an incentive. And then when the incentive's taken away, they don't want to play anymore because the meaning of the task has changed. And now I'm doing it because I want to get something out of it, as opposed to I love the process.

I think that that phenomenon does not have to exist. So we know, for example, at work, if managers, as long as they give people autonomy, they don't present the rewards in a controlling way. So instead of saying, Andrew, in order to earn this, you need to do the following work.

If they say, hey, look, I'd really love it if you would deliver the following. And in order to make that worth your while, I'm offering this incentive. People react very differently when they have a sense of choice and control. So I think that that's, I guess, the starting point.

In the presence of autonomy, I don't think there's a major downside of extrinsic rewards. I think you also have to be careful that, yeah, I guess that you're not over-justifying the task. In other words, you're not swamping people's intrinsic reason for doing it, but you're adding a reason to try it.

So actually, if we go to a different domain for a second. So look at kids who don't want to eat their vegetables. Extrinsic incentives are very effective to get kids to try vegetables for the first time. But then the hope is that they discover a vegetable or two that they don't mind, and then they find reasons to keep doing it.

And I think that that's how I want a lot of rewards to work. I don't think that rewards should be carrots that we dangle to try to control people's behavior. I think they should be symbols of how much we appreciate and value a particular behavior. If you frame them that way, it's a lot easier for people to say, "Yeah, you know what?

That reward is something that I really want, but I'm not only doing the task for that reward." Yeah. You basically answered the question I was going to ask, which is, and at risk of sounding new agey, but we are sitting in California, I could imagine that when one is focused on the extrinsic rewards, so a physical task or a cognitive task for an extrinsic reward, if I'm focusing on the extrinsic reward, I'm also, air quotes again, "not present," right?

I'm thinking about the outcome. I'm not thinking about process. And I think there's, and perhaps you can flesh out some of what this is exactly, but I think there's a fairly extensive data to support the idea that when we are physically and mentally present to the task, that we're going to perform better.

And presumably our intrinsic liking of that task or performing that task increases as well. Is that true? Yeah, I think so. I think, so if we want to break down the mechanisms for why intrinsic motivation is useful for performance, one you touched on earlier, it's focus of attention. It's much easier to find flow when you're intrinsically motivated.

You get into that state of deep absorption where time melts away. So you mentioned sort of either speeding up or slowing down your sense of time. You forget where you are. Sometimes you even lose track of your identity and you're just merged into the task. And so that concentration is helpful.

There's also a greater persistence effect that when you enjoy what you're doing, you're less likely to give up in the face of obstacles. You're more likely to think about it when you're not doing the task and come up with great ideas. And so, you know, I think there's a working harder, there's a working longer, there's a working smarter, and there's also a thinking more clearly effect.