The intrinsic motivation of Richard Ryan and Edward Deci

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• In his study published in 1971, Deci, an experimental psychologist with a math background, tasked two groups of psychology students with solving a Soma cube puzzle in three different sessions, ostensibly as part of a research project on problem-solving. In the second session, one group was paid for each successfully completed puzzle, while the other group was not. In a third session with the same people, neither group was paid. When Deci announced that the time was up, and left participants in each of the two rooms alone for a while, members of the group that had been paid for their work tended to drift away from the task to read magazines, while the group that had never been paid was more likely to continue working on the puzzles.

• Deci and Ryan developed the Self-Determination Theory (SDT) of motivation, which toppled the dominant belief that the best way to get human beings to perform tasks is to reinforce their behavior with rewards.

• Deci concluded that the people who'd been offered money no longer experienced that intrinsic motivation.

• Their 1985 book, Intrinsic Motivation and Self-Determination in Human Behavior, was "our first full statement on SDT," Ryan says. "We're interested in what we would call high-quality motivation, when people can be wholeheartedly engaged in something and really can have both their best experience and their best performance. We've always been interested in factors that facilitate or undermine that motivation, and in investigating that, we came on the idea that there are some really basic psychological needs that everybody has, whether they're in the classroom, workplace, or sports field, that help them thrive and have their highest quality motivation. Those basic psychological needs are autonomy, competence and relatedness. That's the theory in a nutshell."

• Deci concluded that the people who'd been offered money no longer experienced that intrinsic motivation.

• We're interested in what we would call high-quality motivation, when people can be wholeheartedly engaged in something and really can have both their best experience and their best performance