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How to build Intrinsic Motivation: a review of the science

I dig into the research on intrinsic motivation. Super interesting subject. Long but hopefully quite thorough.

Credit where it’s due: behaviourism and operant psychology were able to shed light on many previously enshadowed phenomena – but over time, a number of experimental findings began to emerge that put this paradigm under increasing pressure. There’s a whole lot more to this story than is worth covering here, but the crux of this all is that White’s understanding of these behaviours ran in the face of the behaviourist theories of the day and ultimately paved the way for much of the research into intrinsic motivation that has happened since. This one isn’t strictly about the relationship between choice and intrinsic motivation, but I thought I’d throw it in anyway because it’s closely related and also interesting: Murayama et al (2015) had participants play a game where they were challenged to pause a stopwatch within 50 milliseconds of the 5-second mark.

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