by Claire Dorotik

Created on: February 24, 2010

RE-EXAMINING MOTIVATION

            “Focus on the reward.” You’ve heard this before. “Keep your eye on the prize.” You’ve heard that one too. But do these idioms actually work? In the world of motivation, much attention has been paid to the typical carrot and stick principle. The logic has always followed that if a person creates rewards for herself, she will be more motivated to do the thing that leads to these rewards. Building off of the operant behavioral conditioning principles made famous by B.F. Skinner, considered the father of behavioral theory, these beliefs have led many business leaders, managers, coaches and teachers to ascribe to the idea that in order to get a person to do something, there must be a reward for it. According to Skinner, learning and motivation are dependent on changing behavior. In order to do this, a stimulus is designed to create a desired response, or new behavior. The more this habituated this pattern becomes, the more the person learns, and the greater his motivation becomes.

            However, studies as far back as 1946 contradict this common belief. Harry Harper, a psychology professor at the University of Wisconsin was the first to discover that there is another reason animals and people do things. At the time, the accepted understanding of human behavior was confined to two basic drives: one for survival, and one for reward. Humans were thought to be motivated to ensure their survival demands for food and shelter first, and then were motivated to act in ways that led to a reward.

When Harper set about to test this he presented rhesus monkeys with a small puzzle to solve. The puzzle consisted of a small door with a latch that required removing one pin, sliding another and lifting the latch, a three step process. Harper’s idea was to first socialize the monkeys to the puzzle and then present them with small rewards for any one of the steps that would lead to successful solution of the puzzle. Yet in the time that Harper was allowing the monkeys to become familiar with the puzzle, they began to solve the steps on their own, without reward. As they did, they continued to play with the puzzle. Within forty-five minutes, every monkey had solved the puzzle, without reward. Fascinated, Harper presented them with another puzzle. Again, the monkeys immediately began to attempt

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