Are you a rat?

I’ll never forget when I realized I was a rat!

Majoring in psychology at Sewanee in the late eighties meant spending a lot of time in “Rat Lab”.  Here we learned about what they call today incentives and disincentives or punishment and reward.  We learned this stuff by watching a rat in a box pressing a lever to get food or occasionally a shock through the metal floor system.

Hey, I’m not proud of shocking rats, but that’s how it happened.

We would give food for a few days then suddenly turn the food off and chart how long it took the rat to figure it out and stop pressing the lever.  We would plot his performance in an “extinction graph” and it took him a while to figure it out!  Stupid rat.  Sometimes he would remember.  Then he would forget again and keep trying.  This went on for days!  But rats have tiny little brains so I guess it’s okay.

Anyway, as a lazy college kid when the light burned out in my dorm room one day I never got around to replacing it.

I started to notice that I kept coming into the room and flipping the switch.

Then I’d remember for a while.

Then I’d forget again.

Suddenly it hit me!  My “extinction graph” was the same as the rat who suddenly stopped getting food!

Crap!

“I’m a rat!”

Well I’ve never stopped studying “motivation”.   I’m fascinated by how we learn.

When I was a SCUBA instructor in Key West my teacher told me that I would learn more from my students than I ever taught.  I did not get it at first, but I soon realized I was learning how people learn.

I’m still interested, especially now that I have kids.  I want my kids who are intrinsically motivated.   I want them to actually learn and not just to try to get good grades.    Studies continue to show that performance goals undermine intrinsic interest.  They also show that choice has the opposite effect.  It increases intrinsic interest.

When kids have choices in the types of tasks they engage in and the way they complete them they feel more in control.  More autonomous.  And this sense of autonomy leads to greater conceptual understanding, better grades, enhanced persistence at school, higher productivity, less burnout, and most importantly greater levels of psychological well-being.

Well  guess what?  We are no different than children in this way.  Do you want greater conceptual understanding, enhanced persistence, higher productivity and greater levels of psychological well-being?

I sure as hell do.

What are our  performance goals that are undermining our intrinsic interests?

The promotion, or the big office.  Perhaps it is the new car or a certain sales quota.  A certain annual income?   When we  focus on these performance goals we lose interest and more importantly we miss out on the fabled “greater levels of psychological well-being.”

How do we get the sense of autonomy that leads us to this glory land.

For  kids we de-emphasize grades and emphasize the knowledge gained.

For us we move away from performance goals and focus on life goals.  Spend more time with your kids.  Simplify and become more resilient.

Resilience means having more open doors which leads to more autonomy.  And more autonomy leads to…..

Ahhhhhhhhhh

Greater levels of psychological well-being. Peace of mind.

Making your own way in life can be stressful.  Not having a boss or a schedule tell you what to do every hour of every day.  You have to think.  You will make mistakes.  You will “fall down and go boom”.  But the reward of feeling that you are living a life worth living makes up for it all.

This website is full of helpful tidbits and techniques (I hope) to move you in this direction.  Here are some;

Get your Sh*t together:  Batching tasks to create more free time.

The key to wealth: Stop acting rich:  Avoid stuff and debt and go for experience instead

Face It:  Motivational words

Five rules for the care and feeding of feral children:  How to raise resilient and autonomous children.

Please Have a Great Day!!