Both at work and in personal development, we need motivation. We strengthen it, change it, or scold ourselves for its absence. Psychologist Dmitry Leontiev helps to understand the details of the mechanism that makes us get out of bed in the morning and act — contrary to our desire or in accordance with it.
Psychologies: In one of the interviews, you told us that science today allows you to find out why I am doing something at the moment. What answers can there be?
Dmitry Leontiev: Psychology does not provide direct answers, but more and more can tell about the reasons for our behavior, because motivation is the reason for what we do: why we get out of bed in the morning, why we are currently doing one thing and not another.
One of the greatest psychologists of the end of the last century, Heinz Heckhausen, the founder of the now actively working scientific school, showed that in history there were several successive views on motivation. The first, the most traditional, seems to many the most obvious, because it corresponds to our everyday consciousness. A person does something because he has an internal reason for it. It can be called a motive, an attraction, a need.
Previously, it could be called an instinct, but now almost no one talks about instincts in relation to a person and even in relation to an animal, this concept is outdated and is used only metaphorically. So, there is an internal reason.
What other options? The second view, said Heckhausen, is that we are driven to act by external forces that lie in the situation, in the circumstances. But in its purest form, the second look, even from the point of view of common sense, does not work very well.
Soon a third view arose, which has dominated to this day. Our actions are explained by the interaction of internal factors and forces that are outside of us: in the situation, in social, cultural requirements, and so on. These two groups of factors interact with each other, and our behavior is the product of this interaction.
Is it possible to describe what external and internal causes look like and how they interact? What is the strongest stimulus for us to act?
D. L .: It depends. Little children, like animals, are hard to get to do things against their will. An animal can be trained based on biological needs: food will not be given if you break from the chain, and if you sit at attention for some time, you will get food.
You can only complicate the path to satisfying the initial needs. In a small child, development begins with the fact that he does only what he wants, and there is no way to go against his desires. Further, the initial systems of incentives are gradually supplemented with more complex ones.
As a person is integrated into the network of connections, he learns the rules, thanks to which he can interact with people and adapt to the social environment. He cannot be an absolutely independent subject that directly satisfies his desires, he must be integrated into a rather complex system.
Ultimately, another level of motivation arises: motivation associated with the need for harmonious interaction with the social whole.
Is this motivation internal or external?
D. L .: It is rather external, because initially it does not exist. It is formed in the process of life. This is what is associated with the social nature of man. Mowgli couldn’t have anything like that. But it doesn’t end there.
A person is not just an imprint of social matrices plus the realization of biological needs. We can go further as the development of consciousness, reflection, attitude towards ourselves. As Viktor Frankl famously wrote in his time, the main thing in a person is the ability to take a position, develop it in relation to anything, including in relation to one’s heredity, social environment, and needs.
And where a person and his consciousness develop sufficiently, he is able to take a position: sometimes critical, sometimes controlling in relation to himself. Here comes the third level of needs, which is sometimes described as existential. The need for meaning, for the picture of the world, for the formation of one’s own identity, for the answer to the question “who am I?”, for creativity, for going beyond…
Initially, a person has many different possibilities, and their realization depends on his life. Psychogenetic studies show that genes affect mental manifestations not directly, but indirectly. Genes interact with environmental factors, human life, with specific experience. Their influence is mediated by our real life.
If we return to childhood, to a child: when we educate him, teach him a harmonious life in society, interaction with other people, how can we keep in him the desire to act in accordance with what he has inside? How not to suppress it with social boundaries?
D. L .: It’s not about acting according to your inner needs. It is important that those needs, values, motives that he learns from the outside, learns in the process of interaction with other people, become his own, internal needs.
Psychologist Edward Desi experimentally proved that internal motivation comes from the process itself, and external motivation is connected with what we do to obtain benefits or to avoid trouble. The process may be unpleasant for us, painful, but we know that when we bring the matter to the end, then thanks to this, some of our needs will be satisfied.
This external motivation is one hundred percent learned, assimilated and depends on the conditions in which the adults around us put us. At the same time, the child can be treated as training: “if you do this, you will get candy, if you don’t do it, you will stand in a corner.”
Carrot and stick motivation only works for short periods of time.
This is the path to the formation of motivation based on the principle of carrots and sticks. And such motivation works only in short periods of time. She works in tactical situations and never solves strategic problems.
When a person does something through “I don’t want to”, this leads to adverse psychological consequences: to the formation of internal alienation, insensitivity to one’s emotions, needs, to oneself. We are forced to repress our inner desires, needs, and emotions because they are in conflict with the task we are performing under the influence of external motivation.
But, as Edward Deci and his co-author Richard Ryan have shown in subsequent rounds of research, extrinsic motivation is not uniform. The urges that we internalize from the outside may remain superficial, perceived by us as something external, like what we do «for an uncle.» And they can gradually become more and more profound. We begin to feel them as something of our own, meaningful, important.
In terms of its psychological consequences, such external motivation becomes very close to the real, genuine, internal one. It turns out to be a qualitative motivation, albeit an external one. The quality of motivation is how much I feel that the reasons that make me act are mine.
High quality motivation drives us to action, increases our life satisfaction and self-esteem
If my motives are connected with a sense of myself, with my own identity, then this is a high-quality motivation. Besides the fact that it encourages us to act and gives us meaning, it also generates positive psychological consequences, increases our satisfaction with life, self-esteem.
And if we do something under the influence of external, superficial motivation, then we pay for it with contact with ourselves. Here’s a classic version of extrinsic motivation: fame, success. Viktor Frankl very beautifully showed that the dimension of success and the dimension of meaning are perpendicular to each other.
If I strive for success, there is a risk that at some point it will lose its meaning. Because success is what other people define, not myself. I find a sense of meaning in myself, and for the sake of success I can do what I myself think is absolutely meaningless, even immoral.
Experiments have shown that if a person achieves intrinsically motivated goals, it makes him happy. If a person achieves the same success, but from externally motivated goals, then he does not become happier. Confidence brings us only the success that is associated with our internal motivation.
Is quality motivation something that good teachers and good bosses can cultivate or awaken?
D. L .: Yes. But it’s difficult. The paradox is that if a person is given the opportunity to choose values himself, including giving up something, then he learns them better and more firmly than if he is told: “I will teach you” and they drive it in as an obligation, coercion.
This is one of the paradoxes that has been studied in detail in the theory of self-determination and which sounds in our latitudes as something absolutely unexpected and even improbable: no values can be introduced with the help of pressure and influence. And vice versa, if a person is given the opportunity to freely relate to them and determine himself, then these values are assimilated better.
Since you mentioned self-determination, in 2008 I was pleased with a report on this at a conference on positive psychology. The three basic needs he named seemed very accurate to me.
D. L .: The theory of self-determination is the most advanced theory of personality and motivation in modern scientific psychology to date. It covers various aspects, including the idea of three basic needs. The authors of the theory, Edward Desi and Richard Ryan, abandoned the idea of deriving these needs purely theoretically and for the first time determined them empirically, on the basis of experimental data.
They propose to consider as basic those needs, the satisfaction of which leads to an increase in subjective well-being. And failure to meet these needs leads to its decrease. It turned out that three needs correspond to this criterion. This list is not closed, but strong evidence has been obtained in relation to precisely three needs: autonomy, competence and relationships.
The need for autonomy is the need to choose for oneself. Sometimes we manipulate a small child when we want him to eat semolina. We do not ask him: “Will you eat semolina?” We put the question differently: “Will you have porridge with honey or jam?” Thus, we give him a choice.
Often this choice is false: we invite people to choose something secondary, and we put the main thing out of the brackets.
Often such a choice is false: we offer people to choose something relatively minor, and we put the main thing out of the brackets. I remember there was a wonderful note in Ilya Ilf’s notebook: “You can collect stamps with teeth, you can also without teeth. You can collect stamped, you can clean. You can cook them in boiling water, or not in boiling water, just in cold water. Everything is possible».
The second need is competence. That is, confirmation of one’s capabilities, abilities to do something, to influence events. And the third is the need for close relationships with other people, for human connections. Satisfying her also makes people happier.
Can we say, going back to where we started, that these three needs basically make us get out of bed in the morning and do something?
D. L .: We, unfortunately, do not always do what makes us happy, we do not always satisfy our basic needs. We are not always motivated internally. Needless to say, extrinsic motivation is not necessarily a bad thing.
If I grow vegetables and fruits in my garden and eat them myself, I can do it on the basis of intrinsic motivation. If, within the framework of the division of labor, I specialize in something, sell the surplus on the market and buy what I need, extrinsic motivation comes into play.
If I do something for another person, it is extrinsic motivation. I can be a volunteer, work as an orderly in a hospital. In themselves, there are more pleasant activities, but what I do this for compensates for the shortcomings. Any coordination of actions, helping another person, delaying gratification and long-term planning always involve external motivation.
But intrinsic motivation is positive. She, as a rule, turns out to be dominant in these cases. And it’s easier to motivate with a stick and a carrot. No need to rack your brains, no need to think about how to interest people. You just show them the stick and the carrot.
Unfortunately, bosses often do not what is better and more efficient, but what is easier. This is not to say that it is completely inefficient. But the effectiveness of the stick and the carrot is greatly exaggerated.
The interview was recorded for the Psychologies project «Status: in a relationship» on the radio «Culture» in November 2016.