Hot answers tagged motivation
16
I think you have to be careful with the proposition that "rewards do not increase performance on non-rudimentary tasks". The experiments that Dan Pink cites involve experiments where participants are in a room and are supervised by an experimenter while they complete a task. This social pressure by the experimenter may well be enough for participants to be ...
10
Mahmoud A. Wahba, Lawrence G. Bridwell, Maslow reconsidered: A review of research on the need hierarchy theory (1976), or a free pdf scan here
Its abstract says:
The uncritical acceptance of Maslow's need hierarchy theory despite the lack of empirical evidence is discussed and the need for a review of recent empirical evidence is emphasized. A review ...
10
There is a fundamental concept in motivation illustrating this effect- a bunch of studies have been done which I don't have the time of digging up citations for now, but the central findings are as follows:
If the incentive (external reward) for a non-trivial task becomes too salient, the individual is driven to complete the task for that reward and will ...
10
That was an interesting TED Talk, I enjoyed it. Motivation is a very complex, but fascinating thing to think of. You're asking if those three things he listed are the most important aspects to motivation, but I'm not sure the answer can be straightforward. So let's talk about what motivation is first, before talking about how those three things relate to ...
9
In short, no. Perry's essay is amusing and compelling, but incomplete. Procrastination is an epiphenomenon of motivation, an active area of research which has some models relevant to the study of procrastination, such as:
Hyperbolic Discounting
Temporal Motivation Theory
Rational Choice Theory
Expectancy Theory
Perry emphasizes task importance as the ...
9
Motivation is a massive topic, and it's difficult for me to know what would count as a 'theory' of motivation as it's currently construed. For instance, at one level, we might consider motivation to be the processing of incentive salience on perceived stimuli: you see a cheeseburger, something makes you want it, and so you pursue it. One way of talking ...
9
Our subjective estimation of probability is affected by many irrational factors, one of which is the accessibility of exemplars (Availability Heuristic). Since we usually hear about lottery winners, and not so much about those who didn't win, we over-estimate the probability of winning. It may be similar with your estimation of the probability of the project ...
8
There are a few videos and some links here on gamification in education.
Sarah Smith- Robbins has an article on gamification in education.
http://www.gamifyingeducation.org/ is a website devoted to the topic; the site has a listing of research papers here.
8
It's an interesting question, I imagine the desire is multifaceted and that it may reflect multiple desires and multiple activities. In particular, I'd distinguish between (a) the desire for a viewing experience and (b) the desire to get to the top and achieve goals.
Desire to Climb
There are many examples of people taking joy in climbing.
This can be ...
7
A popular lit review [1] discusses some game concepts that have been empirically tested to support the idea of gamification. In some cases, these may be very hard to quantify. For instance, the article cites fantasy as one gaming characteristic that engages gamers. Other characteristics, such as having clear, well defined rules/goals seem easier to ...
7
I was about to recommend The Oxford Handbook of Social Neuroscience, by Decety and Cacioppo (Oxford University Press, 2011) which has an entire part (10 chapters) dedicated to the neural basis of emotion regulation, motivation, and social interactions. However, I just noticed Panksepp's forthcoming book, The Archaeology of Mind: Neuroevolutionary Origins of ...
6
Neher (1991, FREE PDF) summarises and critically evaluates the theory. From the abstract:
This critique of Maslow's theory of motivation examines all of its
major components. The theory is summarized and its basic propositions
are analyzed in the light of internal logic, other relevant theories,
and related research. This examination points up ...
6
As a starting point, the Steel (2007) meta-analysis in the highly regarded Psychological Bulletin is an excellent starting place for learning about the theoretical and empirical literature on procrastination. However, a lot of the literature seems to be focused on procrastination as trait, rather than treating procrastination as a task specific, temporally ...
6
I believe that Dan Ariely's experiment contradicts your assumption, since he shows that avoiding procrastination makes you better in the task. Thus, the correlation between performance and procrastination is in the opposite causality from what you propose.
see: http://bookoutlines.pbworks.com/w/page/14422685/Predictably%20Irrational for details.
copy pasted ...
6
Major theories of motivation distinguish between implicit and explicit motives - the first refering to (relatively) unconscious, automatically operating motives, the second refering to motives and goals which are accessible for self-reports (McClelland, Koestner, & Weinberger, 1989). Explicit motives are translated into conscious goals, whereas implicit ...
5
High incentives (especially related to time needed to finish a task) makes one very concentrated but at the same time leaves little opportunity to look outsid the box (i.e. to develop a creative approach, sometimes needed to complete a non-rudimentary task).
For a popular science/economics talk, see also:
...
5
The prospect theory works/describes two stages in decision making under risk*.
Stage 1:
Clustering/grouping of the outcomes based on some heuristic. i.e the group the possible outcomes into groups and then choose a reference point out of these.
Stage 2:
Now they switch to the expected utility theory,and act as a rational agent that makes a decision ...
5
One thing to think about is what's meant by "performance." In basic cognitive tasks (e.g., memory experiments), changing the payoff matrix (and thus motivational factors) often influences bias but not discrimination -- in other words, upping the ante, so to speak, makes individuals more conservative (or careful) but doesn't much change their overall ...
5
Obedience
The most famous paper dealing with this issue is Milgram's paper, called Behavioral study of obedience[1]. From the abstract:
This article describes a procedure for the study of destructive obedience in the laboratory. It consists of ordering a naive subject to administer increasingly more severe punishment to a victim in the context of a ...
5
Probably the most striking evidence of "happiness homeostasis" is a now classic study by Brickman, Coates and Bulman (1978) which compared the self-reported happiness of lottery winners and accident victims with a control group. The following quote describes the part of the outcome you'd be interested in succinctly:
Lottery winners and controls were not ...
5
Yes. See contra-freeloading or (for humans) ikea effect.
Contrafreeloading: (verb) The behavior in which animals offered the choice between eating food provided to them for free or working to get that food would eat the most food from the source that required effort. This term was created in 1963 by animal psychologist Glen Jensen. Jensen ran a study on ...
5
Reward systems are one of the most actively studied topics in (cognitive) neuroscience and prediction error - that is, deviations from expected "future" reward - play a big role in that. Since you're particularly interested in models, I recommend checking out the work of Matt Botvinick and Nathaniel Daw. Here are a few papers that might be good starting ...
5
Annoyingly, it depends what area of the research literature you happen to find yourself in. In the perception literature, the distinction lies between subliminal and supraliminal. In the memory and learning literature, the distinction lies between implicit and explicit. In dual-process decision-making theories, the distinction lies between automatic and ...
4
Why does it seems in similar cases sometimes classic conditioning happens and in others habituation?
The Wikipedia article on Habituation explains it fairly well:
The habituation process is a form of adaptive behavior (or neuroplasticity) that is classified as nonassociative learning. Nonassociative learning is a change in a response to a stimulus that does not involve associating the presented stimulus with another stimulus or event such as reward or ...
3
Could you be talking about conformity:
e.g., http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conformity
and/or
groupthink http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groupthink ?
In addition to the famous Milgram studies which you may have already heard about:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment
There's quite a lengthy literature on these issues but those links should get ...
3
Relationship between study time and performance
Plant et al (2004) review the literature of studies that have correlated average time spent studying and variables such as GPA. They report a couple of correlational studies in the literature that found small positive correlations (e.g., $r=.18, r=.23$). They make two main points: (a) academic performance is ...
3
The hierarchy of needs is an observation made by Maslow. It's generally assumed as the model to go by because most people can agree with the list and its order. Therefor it's no longer just a hypothesis, it's a theory.
A quick Google search brings me to this online book: http://www.scribd.com/doc/8703989/Maslows-Hierarchy-of-Needs-A-Critical-Analysis
That ...
Only top voted, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible
