Why the warm glow needs fuel

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Vera is an exceptional waitress. Her skill in carrying multiple dishes from the kitchen to the tables, and piling empty plates, bowls and glasses like a circus acrobat on one arm in the other direction is only matched by her personable interaction with the guests. From spotting that someone needs something and a little joke to a toddler in one of the high chairs to knowledgeable recommendations for the dishes and the wines, she is the restaurant’s best asset. Her secret? Intrinsic motivation – the inner drive that encourages us to do the best at a task we possibly can. She loves her job, and enjoys every bit of it – including making sure the tables are spotless after the guests have left.

Many of them leave a generous tip. That adds up to a tidy bonus every evening, but it was never her reason for going the extra mile. Then, the restaurant owner retired, and his son took over as a manager. He had new ideas for team-based rewards: the tips would be pooled together, and divided equally among the waiting staff. That had been an unpleasant shock to her: it meant a significant cut in her take-home pay, and before long, she found herself looking for a job elsewhere. The intrinsic motivation was apparently not so intrinsic after all. Isn’t that odd?

We seem to assume there are two kinds of motivations: extrinsic motivation, which encourages effort through material incentives, and intrinsic motivation, a nobler variant, independent of external rewards. They are antithetical, we also believe: mixing the two – known as crowding out – corrupts and destroys the noble version. But the example above challenges these assumptions, and it is not an isolated illustration. In a recent Hidden Brain podcast episode, psychologist Ap Dijksterhuis relates how celebrity chef Marco Pierre White, after dropping out of school aged 16, started working in a kitchen and discovered a profound love of cooking. He trained with some of the greatest chefs, and within ten years he had opened his own restaurant and earned a Michelin star. Aged 33, he was the youngest chef to earn three of them. However, shortly after, he quit and gave his stars back, which had symbolized his progress – propelled by his intrinsic motivation to become an ever-better chef. But once he had reached the 3-star ceiling, something changed. Instead of innovating and taking risks, now the only thing that mattered was not making any mistakes that might make him lose a star.

Perhaps the purest form of intrinsic motivation is volunteering. Consider Joe, working for a company where the hours are arranged such that the week ends at noon on Friday. Instead of putting his feet up, watching TV or tinkering in the garden, he volunteered at a daycare centre for preschoolers as a general dogsbody: helping set up the rooms, supporting the animators and clearing up after the children had gone home. Four hours every week, in return for nothing but a warm glow – the noblest, purest motivation. Over the years, occasional little performances to mark the end of the week had become a weekly show with the kids performing a funny sketch or a song to thank the volunteers. Their spontaneity was touching, and with the applause of the many parents who attended just before picking up their offspring, the ritual was often the highlight of his week. Then, Joe got a new job and his Friday afternoons were no longer his. He continued to volunteer on Saturdays now, but that was doing administration, and repairing or restoring toys that had been donated – he never saw the children, and never saw their show. Soon, he started skipping more and more Saturdays, and began looking for another opportunity that would give him back the interaction and recognition he so enjoyed.

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All three examples cast doubt over the purity of the protagonists’ motivation: the external environment clearly influences their behaviour. Yet, in none of the cases did it provide the initial motivation. For Vera the waitress and Joe the volunteer, it did not even provide ongoing motivation – the intrinsic motivation of doing a good job because that is the right thing to do was working exactly as expected. More tips or longer children’s performances would, one suspects, not have affected the behaviour of either. It was the removal of something that, without directly affecting it, had become closely associated with the activity that led to their response. True extrinsic motivation is characterized by a monotonic relationship between reward and response; here, instead, we have a kink from the status quo reference point, much like in Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky’s Prospect Theory. The ‘reward’ is not the engine, it is the pleasant scenery in which the engine of the intrinsic motivation propels us. Take that away, and we take our intrinsic engine elsewhere.

Extrinsic signals for intrinsic motivation

There is a second, perhaps even more important aspect to this: both Vera’s tips and the children’s (and their parents’) appreciation for Joe as a volunteer play a distinct role beyond providing the scenery. Intrinsic motivation means we cast aside our narrow self-interest, and lose the corresponding extrinsic incentives that guide us. But how do we recognize that our effort lands? For that we need, literally, recognition. We need an external signal that confirms our actions are appreciated. And we are wired for seeking, and reacting to, such feedback. When we feel thirsty and subsequently drink a glass of water, we feel a sense of pleasure and satisfaction that signals this is what we should do when dehydrated (rather than, say, comb our hair or take a deep breath). By the same logic, praise, a thank you, a tip, a reciprocating gesture, a social media like, a good review… and indeed the number of paying customers are pleasurable signals telling us, “Well done! Do again!”. Intrinsic motivation is an expression of caring, and it is precisely this caring – directly for others and their enjoyment or wellbeing, but also about doing something as well as we can, even if there is no immediate beneficiary – that makes us yearn for these indicators, like Marco Pierre White’s Michelin stars. But they ceased providing the validation he sought when the 3-star pinnacle was reached. And just like Vera and Joe, with the vital signal gone, he too lost his motivation.

Intrinsic motivation might appear to violate Adam Smith’s famous observation that it is not others’ benevolence but “their regard to their own interest” that meets our needs. This is often cynically interpreted as “We’re only in it for the money”. But if we look closer, we realize that self-interest is an essential component for making intrinsically inspired acts work: it is the channel through which we know they succeed.

Much of our behaviour is not narrowly self-interested. But to see the intrinsic motivation that drives it as nobler and morally superior to grubby extrinsic motivation is mistaken. The belief that extrinsic, material signals must inevitably devalue the purity of intrinsic motivation is illogical and contrary to human nature. The pleasure that people derive from tips, grateful performances, Michelin stars and all the other material signals is nothing to be frowned upon. It should be enjoyed, because not only is it the information that sustains the intrinsically motivated behaviour, it is also the energy fuelling the warm glow that tells us we are doing something Right (with capital R).