I recently described the concept of priming, along with some research that has been done to demonstrate this effect. This article follows directly from that one, so if I mention something that I ‘discussed earlier’, it’s in there. The priming studies are all very interesting, but the question now becomes, how are we going to use priming to our advantage? Here are some suggestions.
1) Figure out what you want to be primed for (duh)
Priming activates certain traits and behaviours, which are usually associated with a certain stereotype. For this reason, this isn’t an exercise you can do without direction, like meditation for instance. With meditation, you just do it, then various benefits come. With priming, you need to know what benefit you want first, and then work out how to prime yourself for it.
2) Out with the old
The next step should be awareness of what we are currently being primed for. In your mind, go over the locations you frequent, try to work out what what stereotypes are associated with the things you perceive. What traits belong to these stereotypes?
If you identify something that might prime you for a behaviour you don’t want, try remove that thing for week or so, and see what happens (please use your head when doing this; don’t throw your dog out because you think it will prime you to pee on lamp posts).
What do you regularly read, and what is that priming you for? What about the TV shows you watch (including the adverts). One other piece of advice is to stop reading newspapers! Apart from the sports section, that is. Given what you now know about priming, read the next newspaper you buy with a careful eye. Notice:
What you’re being primed for
Whether any of the information is really worth knowing.
What purpose headlines like “Terror” “Stabbing” “Crime” and “Recession” serve.
3) In with the new
The third step is to work out what you can add to your environment to prime the goal or behaviour you want. Many self-help authors recommend putting your goals and targets up on the wall, in written form. For example, Steve Pavlina and his Belief Board. We saw in the last article that exposure to written words can prime behaviours associated with those words, and also that the longer the longer the exposure to a prime, the bigger the effect; so this technique should work well. The only problem I can think of, is that we tend to get a bit blind to things after a while, so maybe move them around, change the colours, or reword them fairly regularly.
The basic premise is to douse your environment with words, images, and anything else you can think of that relate to the target you’re aiming for.
If you’re planning to bulk up, then maybe put pictures of gym equipment and Arnold Schwarzenegger around your house. If you’re a student, words and pictures related to professors and intellectuals.
It’s probably best to put some time aside and really think about what primes would work for you, and come up with many of them. Remember the immersion study by Ellen Langer, which made the elderly men younger? This was a full immersion into life 20 years earlier. The carpet, appliances, everything. And this study had a great effect on the participants. It seems like the more primes, the better.
4) Other activities
In Langer’s experiment, it wasn’t just the environment that was manipulated, it was the behaviour of the participants. How they acted, how they spoke, what they spoke about; everything was done in the present tense, as though it was 1959. This might well have played a part too – we know that changing self-talk can influence behaviour and emotions, so it’s not such a large stretch of the imagination that this would work as a prime too.
So self-talk in the present tense about the goal you want to reach (ie, how you would self-talk as if it were already reached) is worth trying, as is changing your actions to be in line with the goal, though there will be obvious limitations to how and where you can do this.
What about the writing exercise from the professors/hooligans study? People spent 5 minutes listing the behaviours, lifestyle and appearance of professors and hooligans, which made the better and worse at general knowledge tests, respectively. In another study. people were asked to write about themselves as they would like to be, which had the result of making them happier. (1) This seems like another exercise worth doing, then, especially when done right before a task related to your goal (eg writing about professors before an exam, writing about an Olympic sprinter before a race. What stereotype is most conducive to the goal you are aiming for, or the task ahead of you?
Remember that the more time people spent on this task, the stronger the effect.
I should also mention visualisation. There’s potentially a cross-over between this line of research and the popular self-help technique, the “Law of Attraction” (eg., The Secret). Could mentally visualising a certain goal serve to prime us to adopt behaviours favourable to that goal? I’m currently working on a separate article on the evidence behind visualisation, but for now, based on what I’ve read so far, I’d say yes; it’s definitely worth a try.
Some things to keep in mind
The experiments measured the effect of the primes directly after the participants were primed. I can’t imagine people who had been primed with ‘elderly’ stereotypes walking slowly all day and all night after that point: so maybe the best time to apply a prime is right before a specific task. I always find I work harder if I spend 30-60 minutes reading Atlas Shrugged, a book where the main characters love their work and do it all day long.
A limitation here is that we can’t really generalise beyond what the research actually says. There’s evidence you can become younger, ruder, smarter, more physically persistent, and so on, but we can’t just take these findings and generalise them to any particular goal. The things people did as a result of their primes were all things they had done before; knowledge structures they already possessed becoming active. However, I do think it’s worth trying these techniques on just about any goal.
A final point to make is that the effect of priming might be cumulative. As we discovered earlier with the basketball video, priming reduces our input. Therefore the range of things we can potentially be primed by is reduced also. It is possible that you could get into an upward or downward spiral, by receiving a prime and then being more likely to be primed by something similar again in the future.
So perhaps a key to positive priming is regular and consistent priming, until you reach such a critical mass as the majority of the primes you receive on a daily basis are conducive to your goals. This is just a guess though; don’t quote me on it.
To conclude, I hesitate to say you “will” get a certain response from the priming. All I can say for sure is what the evidence has shown. But I think there’s enough evidence to recommend the use of this technique, at the very least, just as a personal experiment.
References
(1) Lyubomirsky, S., Sousa, L., & Dickerhoof, R. (2006). The costs and benefits of writing, talking and thinking about life’s triumphs and defeats. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 90(4), 692-708.
Practically nothing you can measure about a person is completely fixed. Some days you don’t concentrate as well, some days your more sociable, some days you have more energy. Even your height varies subtly throughout the day. If we’re interested in positive psychology and self-improvement, a constructive line of inquiry would be working out what causes these variations, and seeing if we can manipulate that cause to give us more of a particular behaviour, emotion, or whatever.
One of these causes is ‘Priming’. Priming is a phenomenon where being exposed to a certain stimuli makes a particular response to a second stimuli more likely to happen. For example, smelling the freshly baked bread when you walk into a store makes you more likely to buy some bread. That’s a simple example, but incredibly, priming also applies to motor skills, physical exertion, intellectual capacity, social graces; even our mental and biological age. Some portion of our performance in these and many more areas is dictated by how we’ve recently been primed.
“Affirmations are not the most effective way to prime.”
‘Positive Priming’, in this context, simply means to use this phenomenon to our advantage.
This is going to be a fairly long article. I did a lot of background reading, and doing that really helped drill the main points into my head, so I wouldn’t be giving you the same benefit if I didn’t cover the topic in depth.
I recommend reading from the top down, rather than scanning, as the points build upon one-another as you go along. Feel free to bookmark and return later.
“Every day in every way….”
Originally, this piece was going to be called “Affirmations: Self-Help Scam or Useful Technique?”. I was researching affirmations; the common practice of saying or writing your goals regularly, which is supposed to program the goal into your subconscious. But affirmations fall into the larger group of priming techniques, and as we’ll see, they’re not the most effective way to prime.
A pretty blonde
I mentioned above some examples of how priming can effect behaviour, but it can also alter your perceptions – being primed for a certain thing seems to filter out other things – a goal reduces input.
When you’re walking around the world, you get bombarded by stimuli from all directions. How does your mind know which ones to pay attention to, and which to ignore? Human nature plays a role; some things are just hardwired into us. If I walk past a pretty blonde on the high street, you can be pretty sure I won’t be looking in the shop windows.
Sex and danger are probably the two main things we’re hardwired to look out for. But our brain also has the function to adopt other “rules” on the fly; presumably this helped our nomadic ancestors adapt to the new and varied environments they were so fond of wandering into.
Watch the team in white!
Here’s an example. In the video below, you’ll see two basketball teams, each with three members, one team wearing black, the other wearing white. They each have a ball, and will pass it between their team mates. All you have to do is count how times the white team pass the ball. The black team will try to confuse you by weaving around and making passes of their own. See how effective you are at filtering the black team out so as to only count the white team passes. Come back when you’re done and see if you counted correctly (don’t cheat and skip ahead!). By the way, one particular gender is better at this task than the other. Which do you think it is?
Did you do it? I’ll tell you the correct answer in a moment. You can only be successful at this task by setting up that goal in your mind, in other words, to be primed for it, and have that goal reduce the other input so you can focus on your goal.
Filters
A prime is like a filter, then. It blinds you from other things that are irrelevant to your goal, and focuses you on things that are relevant. The classic example is buying a new car of a certain colour, and then suddenly seeing that colour car everywhere.
That’s just like your previous goal of counting the ball bounces. Watch that video again. This time, don’t have the goal of counting. Just watch it. What happens about half way through? You’d think you would have noticed a huge gorilla walk through the middle and beat his chest, wouldn’t you? And maybe you did – some people see it, but a substantial amount (over half) don’t. Your prime filtered out everything that isn’t to do with counting the passes – everything that’s irrelevant to your goal.
(Note: the comment about one gender being better was a lie to make you focus more, I must give credit to Michael Kolster for that idea)
The Effect of Primes
Ignoring gorillas might be a good way to make a point, but it’s a pretty useless skill, if you think about it. If we’re going to find a practical application for this phenomenon, we need to answer two questions:
1) How exactly do we prime someone (or ourselves?).
2) What exactly can we do with this technique? How far we can take it?
In answer to question 1, a prime doesn’t have to be an elaborate stimuli. In fact, you don’t even need to see it consciously. Take the emotions ‘like’ and ‘dislike’, or approach and withdraw. Most, if not all creatures seem to have these – or a system that does a similar job. Jonathan Haidt explains that these emotions run along a scale, a “like-o-meter”. If the like-o-meter is currently set to ‘like’, it will take a while longer to get over to the other side when something you dislike comes along.
Imagine you’re shown a word on screen, and asked to press a button to rate it as good or bad. Pretty easy. “Flower”; Good. “Play”; Good. “Evil”; Bad. No problems. But if, just before you saw the word, the screen flashed up another one, so quickly that only your subconscious picks it up, interesting things start to happen. If the word “Death” is flashed just before “Garden”, it takes you longer to evaluate “Garden” as good, because your like-o-meter takes a while to swing back over. (1)
So even a very short exposure to a written word can work as a prime, but again, it’s pretty useless. We may need stronger primes to get a stronger effect.
They Comments Leave see Usually
Maybe a word scrambling puzzle could provide a stronger prime – something a person has to get involved in, put effort into. One study took participants into a room, and gave them a simple puzzle to do – put some jumbled sentences into the right order. After they were done, they were told to fetch the experimenter, who would be waiting in the next room. Some participants were given ‘rude’ words to unscramble, such as “they her bother see usually”, others were given ‘polite’ words like “they her respect see usually”.
After completing the puzzles, the participants went to the next room, but found the experimenter in the hallway; apparently talking to another participant who was having trouble with the task. In fact, he was a confederate, and the conversation was faked to see whether the rude and polite words would prime the participants to interrupt. Over 60% of the participants primed with ‘rude’ words interrupted their conversation. Less than 20% of people primed with polite words interrupted. (2)
Now we’re getting to some more tangible results. By mere exposure to a few words for about 5 minutes, we can influence how likely someone is to interrupt a conversation.
But it gets better.
Dumb hooligans and slow walkers
That’s a pretty impressive result, but there have been many priming experiments, with more powerful effects. How about intelligence? In another study, participants sat at a a computer and spent a few minutes listing the behaviours, lifestyle and appearance of either professors, or soccer hooligans. Afterwards, a multiple-choice general knowledge test was given. The participants receiving the ‘professor’ prime did better than a group that had no prime, and those primed with ‘hooligan’ did worse. Priming these stereotypes actually seemed to make people more or less intelligent.
Also, the strength of the effect could be altered by changing the priming time – the longer the better – people primed for 9 minutes showed a stronger effect than people primed for 2 minutes.
The research base on priming is massive. Here’s a rundown of just some of the other impressive findings:
When the participants were primed with words related to elderly stereotypes, they would walk more slowly down the hall after finishing the experiment. (2)
Voters are more likely to support tax raises to support education when the polling location is a school. (3)
In a game of Prisoner’s Dilemma, players play more aggressively if there is a briefcase in the room, and more cooperatively if there is a backpack in the room (executives compete; rock climbers cooperate). (4)
Visual exposure to a sports drink led to more persistence on a physically demanding task. Not drinking the sports drink: looking at it! (5)
It appears that by being primed for a certain stereotype, the behaviours and traits we associate with that stereotype become active in ourselves. We start to play that role.
At this point things are looking promising. We can alter the results of knowledge tests, change competitive behaviours, make people rude; just by exposure to a few words in a lab. Can we take this further?
I’m a big reader of fitness and nutrition literature. I love the subject and could easily have followed that path instead of psychology (although there’s plenty of time for both). I have also noticed that the times I exercise the most and eat the healthiest are the times I’m spending a lot of time reading about the subject.
Could this be priming at work? Maybe the deeper I immerse myself into fitness primes, the stronger I play the fitness role? If so, what would happen if we threw ourselves into a world where everything around us was intended to prime us for a particular response? The next study I’ll describe is incredible!
The Fountain of Youth
In 1979, famous psychologist Ellen Langer and colleagues took a group of participants – all men over 70 – to a five-day retreat in search of the fountain of youth – and found it.
The retreat was a mock up of life some 20 years previous. No modern conveniences were present, participants had to talk in the present tense about the 50s, and before going, they wrote an autobiography as though it were 1959. A week’s worth of activities were devised, all based around daily life in 1959.
How would you measure age? Interestingly, there’s no biological marker of age. Without knowing your birthdate, there is no scientific way to tell you how old you definitely are. To make up for this, a massive group of related variables were measured instead: weight, dexterity, flexibility, vision, taste, intelligence, memory – all things that deteriorate with age. Photographs were also taken, and participants were asked to fill out a self-evaluation test.
The participants spent only five days in the faux 1950’s environment, and on leaving, the same tests were given again. The results were incredible. They performed better on the cognitive tests. Their memory had improved. Even their eyesight and hearing had improved! As far as science was able to tell, the clock had turned back – they got younger!
Maybe the phrase “you’re only as old as you feel” should be “you’re only as old as you’re primed to feel”.
At this point I was going to add a section called “Practical Priming”, with suggestions on how to put this information to use. It’s 90% done, but I have to go away for a couple of days, so I’ll finish it off and put it up separately when I get back.
This title fight pits two classic pieces of folk wisdom against each other! Both ideas are fully indoctrinated into our culture, but which one is correct?
Introducing first, in the red corner, hailing from the depths of human optimism, the current, reigning and defending champion: “You can do anything you set your mind to!”
And in the blue corner, hailing from parts unknown, weighing in at a few books and some empirical studies, the challenger: “Stick to your strengths!”
Scheduled for three rounds, this might be the biggest title fight in the personal development history! The outcome of this fight might determine what you choose to do with the next phase of your life, and change your destiny forever!
Or, it might just be mildly interesting. Either way, keep reading.
Round 1 – Definition
What exactly does it mean to say “You can do anything you set your mind to”? It’s a tribute to the power of dedication, persistence, and time, or course. It means that even against all odds, these three pillars will support your success; all you have to do is try hard enough for long enough.
This perspective may or may not include the idea that “all men are created equal”. It may or may not concede that certain things comes easier to some people than they do to others. The phrase simply means that over the long-term, no inherent talent or current ability will play a greater role in getting you what you want than the above three factors.
“You can do anything…” is simply a tribute to the power of dedication, persistence, and time.
Of course, this is a very positive and uplifting message. It gives us hope and makes us all that little bit more equal. So naturally, it’s a popular concept within motivational literature.
What about the opponent? When we say “Stick to your strengths”, what do we mean by that? We mean actions you can consistently do well, which lead to productive results. We also mean useful traits, and strengths of character.
A strength is a label given to a part of your brain or nervous system that is more efficient than other parts. As you go about your life, different types of thought, behaviour and feeling are called upon, either by your own actions or in response to something happening to you. The requests that your brain processes quickly or effectively are your strengths.
In Now, Discover Your Strengths, Marcus Buckingham uses a technological analogy. He explains that if your brain is like the internet, with the synapses in your brain being equivalent to the different connections between computers, your strengths are like your T1 lines (or whatever technology happens to be fastest at the time you read this!). They process input and provide an output much faster than other areas of the brain.
If you’ve got a tendency to respond to the world with what we’ve labelled “kindness”, it’s because the synapses that lead to altruistic actions are strong and fast. Nature always takes the path of least resistance, so when you perceive an opportunity to be “kind”, you usually take it. So the idea behind the saying is, shape your life around your strengths, because it will be hard or even impossible to go against the grain.
Round 2 – Evidence
Try googling “You can do anything you set your mind to”. You’ll find a load of very inspirational articles, each containing examples of people who have defied the odds. A cancer-ridden triathlon winner, an entertainer who succeeded across multiple fields, a man who became a kickboxing champion in six weeks. From this, the articles conclude that yes, you can do anything you set your mind to. These people did, so why can’t you?
Well, maybe it’s because these examples have all been selected specifically to support that point! I could write an article called “You can’t do anything you set your mind to” and fill it with some great examples of human failure – unsuccessful political systems, disastrous military campaigns, music careers that never left the ground; it would be no more valid. More on why, here.
We need stronger evidence than this. It comes in part, from Carol Dweck. Dweck and colleagues have studied the effect that beliefs about intelligence can have on various types of task performance. Basically, if you believe intelligence is a fixed entity, you’ll perform worse than if you view it as malleable. In the book, Why Smart People Can Be So Stupid, Dweck’s chapter explains these concepts and gives examples of some of the studies that have been done. For instance, when college students were taught that intelligence is malleable, their GPA increased, along with their commitment to their school work.
These results show that positive beliefs about the effects of effort can increase performance and motivation. So far so good, but they don’t explain how far a person can go with this. For that information, we turn to a different area of research.
Some interesting studies have been done on the effects of deliberate practice. At low levels of practice, things like genetics and natural aptitude account for most of the variation in ability. But after ever increasing amounts of practice, the sheer volume of training starts to take over, and eventually it accounts for more ability than any other factors. In many fields, it was found that no one had reached the level of mastery without around 10 years of deliberate practice, involving about 10,000 hours of training. This is regardless of natural strengths or ability. (1)
That’s a strong case for the champion, but what about the challenger?
“The ‘best of the best’ shape their lives around their strengths.”
The Gallup Organisation has been very active in researching strengths. As part of their work they interviewed over 2 million individuals in almost all professions, looking for patterns between the top achievers. They found that the “best of the best” shape their lives around their strengths, and found ways of developing and applying these strengths in the areas they wanted to become effective in.
So while practice might override talent at the highest levels, it seems it’s easier to get there by using practice that involves strengths: If this wasn’t the case, Gallup would have found many top achievers who weren’t employing their strengths. (2)
Researchers have also looked at the quality of activities that employ strengths versus those that don’t, finding that people are more intrinsically motivated to do activities which use their strengths. (3) In my own dissertation, I found that people using their strengths experienced more flow (the state of being ‘in the zone’, totally focused on the task), and enjoyed the activities more.
Perhaps because of the above benefits, people who start to use their strengths on a regular basis become happier. One study asked people to integrate their strengths into their lives, and measured their happiness over the next six months. They found their happiness had increased each time it was measured. In StrengthsQuest, Donald Clifton and Edward Anderson note that regular strengths use leads to more confidence, optimism, and direction in life. (4)(5)
Round 3 – A thought experiment
Let’s take the points from the previous round and see how they might work in an example.
Imagine two people, Bob and Jane. Bob is extroverted and full of zest, with a natural sense of humour. He’s always ‘on the go’, looking for something fun to do. Jane is introverted, intelligent, and prudent. She spends most evenings in front of a fireplace with a good book. How well would each of them do in the role ‘stand up comedian’? Could Jane, do well in this field, if she put her mind to it?
If self-help books could speak, they’d chorus an enthusiastic ‘yes’. People supporting a strengths perspective would answer a resounding ‘no’. Who’s right?
“Going against the grain would be a tough, inefficient, unsatisfying way to reach excellence.”
The work on dedicated practice suggests that given enough practice, and a long enough timeline, the answer is, yes, Jane could be an expert comedian. Of course, Bob could get there more easily; he would find more satisfaction in practising, be more motivated, and progress faster. Because Jane is going against the grain, her success depends on whether her natural tendencies allow her to get enough practice in. The process of reaching excellence would be a chore, and she’d have more setbacks and frustrations to overcome. But if she could find a way to keep going, in theory, she could make it.
I say ‘in theory’, because in practice it’s probably rare that someone could maintain that level of training without any intrinsic enjoyment of it. Without love for the activity itself, it’s easy to imagine Jane burning out long before reaching 10 years and 10,000 hours of practice. It would be a tough, inefficient, unsatisfying way to reach excellence.
On the other hand, employing strengths is much easier. Bob would be happier overall, have more motivation to practice; for him, it will all just seem easier and more natural. Another great example is The Beatles, who clearly had a natural aptitude for music, and loved performing. They had clocked up nearly 10,000 hours of practice before they even released a single – they are an extreme example of what can happen when you combine your strengths with massive amounts of practice, rather than have the two work against each other!
Final Bell!
When the final bell rings, both fighters are still standing. The first two rounds were pretty even, both combatants landing some strong blows. But in the third, “You can do anything you set your mind to” started looking a little worse for wear. “Stick to your strengths” is your winner and new champion, earning the victory on points!
When people say “you can do anything…”, they mean that even against tough odds, you can succeed if you have enough persistence and determination. While that may technically be true, the phrase speaks only of the end result, and says nothing about the quality of the journey we must undertake to get there. By sticking to your strengths you reduce the number of options you have, but what you lose in quantity you make up for in quality. Unless there is some hugely important reason to go against your strengths, or a massive sense of meaning you attach to it, being happier and deriving more satisfaction from what you do is always going to be the better option.
After you saw ‘motivation’ in the title of this article, maybe you thought this would be one of those moving, inspirational pieces, designed to spring you into action, immediately. You know the sort; written in a lively and stimulating way, they bestow you with a sense of purpose and enthusiasm that you’re certain to carry with you for at least the next ten minutes.
But it’s not. I’m not really qualified for that, to be honest. To me, the people that write those things seem like some kind of super-efficient neo-human. Like they leap out of bed at 6am every morning (doing their affirmations before they land), do some morning yoga, then in an efficient and streamlined way, get a full day’s work in before 9am. Yikes! On a morning, I’m barely conscious enough to make my fried egg sandwich for breakfast. OK, a little more conscious than that, but you get my point.
So I’m not explaining how to increase motivation, but rather I’m describing the types of motivation that exist. If you find yourself with ‘no motivation’, maybe it’s not that you don’t have any, but that you have the wrong type.
Two Main Types of Motivation
Motivation is a useful thing. It’s the driving force behind our behaviour. It produces. But it’s not necessarily a single concept – there are many types of motivation. You could break it down in many ways, but almost any will include the two main types: extrinsic and intrinsic motivation. With extrinsic motivation, you’re doing something because the activity will bring some reward or benefit at the end of it. With intrinsic motivation, you’re doing something purely because you enjoy the activity itself.
For example, take job hunting. Chances are, job hunting isn’t on your list of hobbies. You probably don’t spend your spare time filling out applications and going to interviews just for the fun of it (or maybe you do). People do it because they want the outcome – a job. And it seems to me that in the majority of cases, the motivation to go to these jobs is extrinsic too. Would you do your job even if you didn’t get paid for it?
Of course, things aren’t this black and white in real life, there are shades of grey between the two extremes, which I’ll describe later. But it’s interesting to note that over the life-span, we start to take less intrinsically motivated actions. As children almost everything we do is for the enjoyment of it; this spontaneous learning and curiosity is vital for our cognitive development. As we get older, rules and regulations mean that most of what we do is extrinsically motivated to some extent.
The Benefits of Intrinsic Motivation
Think about some of the things you do on a regular basis. Are you mostly extrinsically motivated, acting in preparation for rewards to come? Or are you mostly intrinsically motivated, seeking engagement and well-being within the things you do?
It should come as no surprise that the more intrinsically motivated an action is, the more enjoyable it is; it’s practically the definition. So from the point of view of pure enjoyment, it makes sense to have more intrinsically motivated activities in your life. People who are intrinsically motivated show more interest and excitement over what they do, and have more confidence. (1)
But apart from the pure enjoyment of the activity, you’re actually better at intrinsically motivated actions too. You show more persistence and creativity, and because of that you’ll have increased vitality and self-esteem. (1)
As I mentioned earlier, there are shades of grey, and you don’t need to be fully intrinsically motivated to get these benefits. In various fields, positive outcomes have been found from motivation that is almost, but not quite intrinsic. To name a few, these include: exercise, where it is easier to stick to exercise routines as intended; religion, where people who identify with their religion have better mental health and well-being than people who see religion as a means to an end; and environmental behaviours, where more intrinsic environmental motivation leads to more activities that are better for the environment. (2)
So if you want to do more of something, you could try to change your motivation to something closer to intrinsic motivation. If you do so, your performance will improve, and you’ll generally be happier. Before explaining exactly how that’s done, I’ll describe the shades of grey that exist between the extremes of motivation.
Shades of Grey (or orange)
The gradations of motivation have been classified by psychologists Richard Ryan and Edward Deci of the University of Rochester, in what they call Self-Determination Theory, or SDT for short. In this model, the types of motivation exist on a continuum, with pure intrinsic motivation on the right, amotivation on the far left, and four shades of extrinsic motivation in between them. Your motivation towards a particular activity will fit into one of these categories, although there may be some overlap with its neighbours. Here’s the diagram they use to illustrate this (opens in new window):
The Self-Determination Continuum
From left to right, we have:
Amotivation – The state of lacking the intention to act. In this state, a person either won’t act at all, or will ‘go through the motions’, lacking any specific purpose or intention.
External Regulation –Activities are done purely to satisfy some external demand. When doing externally regulated activities, people typically feel controlled or alienated.
Introjected Regulation – Behaviours are still performed to achieve a reward or avoid a punishment, but these things are internal; for example, to avoid guilt or anxiety, or to boost the ego with pride.
Identified Regulation – This reflects a conscious valuing of a behavioural goal – they are activities people identify with, that are seen as personally important.
Integrated Regulation – An identified regulation has been fully integrated into the self. It has been brought into congruence with the other values and needs a person has.
Intrinsic Motivation – An activity is carried out purely for the inherent satisfaction of doing so.
(The diagram and these notes are based on reference 1)
For example, I try to do some form of exercise 3-4 times per week, usually weights. For me, this is integratedregulation. It’s been a regular part of my week for over 10 years, and it fits in with my other values and habits. Still, it’s not intrinsic. Despite how integrated it is, and how congruent it is with the rest of me, if it didn’t make me stronger, healthier, and look good naked, I doubt I’d do it. Imagine a guy who does not value health or fitness, and only works out so that people react to him more positively. For this guy, it’s introjected regulation – his motive is ego-based, he does it to maintain self-esteem.
On the other hand, playing the guitar is 100% intrinsically motivated for me. No one hears me, I don’t play to anyone but myself, and I don’t have any goals with it whatsoever. I scarcely even try to get better, I just enjoy playing a few songs I know. But I only play very rarely; in fact, my guitar isn’t even in my house presently. It’s not an integrated behaviour, but I’m intrinsically motivated to do it.
If you have a goal you’re working towards, where is it on the scale? Where’s your profession? If it’s far to the left, but important to you, you can take steps to move it to the right, but note that this isn’t a developmental scale – you don’t figure out where you are, then move through all the stages, mastering each one on your way to intrinsic motivation. Ultimately, the procedure to move a regulation further to the right is similar wherever you start from. However, if you’re not already intrinsically motivated, you might just end up at integrated – which shares many of the benefits.
How to develop intrinsic motivation
There are many things that we have to do in this complex modern life, and we can’t expect everything to be intrinsically motivating. But since it seems worthwhile to get more of our actions to the right side of the continuum, the question is, how do we stay motivated to do nonintrinsically motivating things? The answer lies in our psychological needs. Intrinsic motivation is developed and maintained when three of our basic psychological needs are satisfied. These needs are competence, autonomy, and relatedness. They are thought to be essential to human motivation and growth. Here’s a description of each and suggestions for how to satisfy these needs. (3)
Autonomy is the need to have control over what you do – to self-regulate, and make your own choices. I talked about its relation to happiness here. You’ll see that in the diagram above, the more to the right you go, the more internalised the behaviours are within the self – in other words, the more they feel ‘you’. This process involves adopting values from other people and from the environment. But a new value needs to be understood and synthesised with existing goals and values, which is a self-directed process – we need the opportunity to freely subscribe to new values. Any external pressures and controls will obstruct this process. As well as the integration of values, autonomy is important in a more general sense – having control over what you do and how you do it. The more control you feel you have, the more intrinsically motivated you’ll tend to be.
How to support autonomy:
1) Increase Control/Choice – Find ways to direct your actions and environments. Things as simple as controlling the layout of your furniture have been shown to increase autonomy, right up to having ultimate control over what you do. See what you are able to control and have choice over.
2) Integrate Values – Think about the ways in which you agree with the actions you’re taking. Why are they right and correct? Considering the value of a behaviour to yourself will facilitate its integration.
3) Create Novelty – Look for ways to inject novelty into your actions. Can you do the same thing in a different location, or alter the task or goals in some ways? Or can you even find new reasons to do them? This way you’ll get the benefits of increased novelty as well as autonomy.
4) Remove Deadlines – Deadlines will reduce intrinsic motivation drastically. Even if it’s a task you really like to do, the pressure of a deadline will remove your sense of autonomy and your motivation along with it.
5) Remove Pressured Evaluations – As with deadlines, high pressure evaluation will also reduce your autonomy and your motivation, and should be avoided if possible.
Competence refers to our innate drive to engage new challenges and experience mastery – to get good at things. For motivation, perceived competence is the important thing, rather than objective performance. Positive feedback on performance tends to enhance a person’s perceived competence, but only where they feel that they are responsible for the good performance. If they feel they did well by chance, and then receive positive feedback on the performance, this will tend to undermine intrinsic motivation because it will overshadow their feelings of autonomy. So it’s better to say what a person did well, rather than just saying “heck of a job, champ!”
How to support competence:
1) Get better – Sounds obvious, but the more competent you are at a certain activity, the more motivated you’ll be to do it. If you’re trying to learn a new skill and losing motivation because it’s difficult, at least take heart in the knowledge that the better you get, the more motivated you’ll typically get.
2) Get positive feedback – Your motivation will become more integrated if you can find some way of getting positive feedback on your progress. This feedback should be informational rather than controlling, and should highlight specific positive aspects of your performance. (4)(5)
3) Avoid negative feedback – Likewise, negative feedback will stand in the way of perceived competence, and therefore block intrinsic motivation too. (6)
4) Break complex tasks down – If a task is very complex and challenging, don’t take it on all at once. Break it down into moderately challenging subtasks. Once competence has been reached for each of the subtasks, then move on the the task as a whole. (7)
5) Set appropriate difficulty levels – Difficulty needs to be moderately challenging – not so easy that you become bored, but not so difficult that your feelings of competence diminish. If a task is too easy or hard, find some way to adjust accordingly.
Relatedness is the basic human need to feel connected to others. SDT suggests that people naturally internalise and integrate the values of the social groups around them, and as they do so, their motivation to do things in line with this new value system will improve – as long as they do not feel coerced, and have a sense of competence. This natural human need seems to be a part of our tendency to merge into social groups. Knowing this, we can hijack this system, and use it to consciously internalise behaviours that we want.
Relatedness is not essential for intrinsic motivation, which we can achieve alone (like my guitar playing, although some might say other people are better off not hearing it…). But, it is very important for internalising and integrating behaviours and activities – bringing activities into the ‘good’ side of extrinsic motivation. Note that researchers have not yet found high levels of intrinsic motivation without autonomy and competence to go with it.
How to support relatedness:
1) Improve the interpersonal climate – in group situations, the atmosphere should be supportive and informational, as opposed to pressuring and controlling. (8)
2) Find social groups – When people feel involved with groups that espouse certain values and behaviours, the way is smoothed for these values to be integrated. By finding groups that embrace the values and behaviours you want, you can adopt them yourself by joining these groups.
3) Supportive social connections – Friends, family and associates that are autonomy supportive and competence supportive (eg., encourage you to make choices, give positive feedback and encouragement, have the same values as you, and so on) will be generally beneficial to integration and intrinsic motivation.
When you’re using this model to increase your motivation, there are two ways to go about it. The first is to look at your life as a whole, and shift things around so that these three needs are better met. For example, switch jobs to one that better meets the above criteria, use your spare time for things you enjoy doing simply for their own sake, spend time with people of similar values, etc. This way, you’ll experience more integration and intrinsic motivation overall, and as the research indicates, greater well-being and psychological health will follow. If there’s a regular part of your life which thwarts these three needs, it would be worth thinking up ways to get out of it.
The second way, is to to take an activity that is important to you, but you are extrinsically motivated to do, and then integrate the three needs into the activity, such that they are better satisfied. This will increase your integration relative to that specific task. That’s what I’ve assumed you would be doing as I wrote this, so I’ve written the above suggestions from that perspective.
If you’re trying to motivate yourself to do something, this by definition is a self-determined process. So it would make sense to adopt more of a self-determined motivational style, rather than spend all day recanting affirmations, and reading uplifting stories. You can read all the motivational literature you like – and these things are well enough in their own way – but according to this theory, if you’re not doing anything to meet the three needs of competence, autonomy and relatedness, you might as well read cereal packets.
