There are two types of motivation: intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. That is, you can be intrinsically motivated to perform a certain task, or you can be extrinsically motivated to perform it. Here’s the difference between the two:
- Intrinsic motivation is motivation that comes from the enjoyment you get from the task itself, or from the sense of satisfaction that you get from working on the task.
- Extrinsic motivation, on the other hand, is about external rewards, such as grades, a prize, money, prestige, and so on.
Although extrinsic motivation works for certain types of activities, one of the keys to creativity, happiness, and the realization of your full potential is the ability to be intrinsically motivated. There is much more on this in below.
The Candle Problem
I’m going to begin by explaining “the candle problem”, and you’ll be able to see how it relates to the subject of “intrinsic v. extrinsic motivation” when you read about Daniel Pink’s Ted.com talk in the next section of this blog post.
Psychologist Karl Duncker coined the term “functional fixedness”, which is a mental block that prevents people from using an object that has a particular function in a new and different way.
That is, people tend to have a bias as to what an object is used for, and this bias interferes with their ability to be able to notice or come up with other, novel uses for that object.
In Duncker’s famous 1945 candle problem, participants were given the following objects:
- A candle
- A box filled with thumb-tacks
- A box of matches
The task was to attach the candle to the wall so that it didn’t drip on the table below, without using any additional elements. At first, participants tried to thumb tack the candle directly to the wall, or to adhere the candle to the wall by taking a match and melting the side of the candle. However, neither of these approaches work.
The solution to the problem is to stop thinking of the box of thumb tacks as a “container”, and to instead think of it as a “shelf” or “platform”. That is, the answer is to take the thumb tacks out of the box, use a couple of thumb tacks to nail the box to the wall, and then use the inside of the box as a candle-holder. (See the image at the top of this blog post for an illustration.)
Dan Pink – The Surprising Science of Motivation
Dan Pink– author of the bestseller “A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future” and of Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us–makes the case in a Ted.com talk titled “The Surprising Side of Motivation” for rethinking our reliance on external rewards as our motivation.
Pink begins his talk by referring to “the candle problem” explained above. He adds that a scientist named Sam Glucksberg, who is now at Princeton University, conducted an experiment which relied on the candle problem to demonstrate the power of incentives.
Glucksberg gathered his participants and told them that he was going to time them to see how quickly they could solve the candle problem. In addition, he added the following:
- He told one group that he was going to time them to determine how long it typically took people to solve this type of problem.
- When it came to the second group, he offered them a reward: he told them that if they were in the 25% that solved the problem the fastest, they would get $5.00. In addition, the person who was the fastest of all would get $20.00.
It took the second group–that is, the group that was offered the reward–three and a half minutes longer, on average, to solve the problem than it took the first group. This goes against the widely held notion that if you want people to perform, you offer them prizes, bonuses, commissions, and so on as incentives.
An incentive that was supposed to sharpen focus and enhance creativity did just the opposite: it dulled thinking and blocked creativity. And this isn’t an aberration; this experiment has been replicated over, and over, and over again for nearly forty years.
Another Variation on the Candle Problem
Glucksberg later redid the same experiment, except this time, when he pres