The Misconception: There is nothing better in the world than getting paid to do what you love.
The Truth: Getting paid for doing what you already enjoy will sometimes cause your love for the task to wane because you attribute your motivation as coming from the reward, not your internal feelings.
Office Space - Courtesy Twentieth Century Fox
Money isn’t everything. Money can’t buy happiness. Don’t live someone else’s dream. Figure out what you love and then figure out how to get paid doing it.
Maxims like these often find their way into your social media; they arrive in your electronic mailbox at the ends of dense chains of forwards. They bubble up from the collective sighs of well-paid boredom around the world and get routinely polished for presentation in graduation speeches and church sermons.
Money, fame, and prestige – they dangle just outside your reach it seems, encouraging you to lean farther and farther over the edge, to study longer and longer, to work harder and harder. When someone reminds you that acquiring currency while ignoring all else shouldn’t be your primary goal in life, it feels good. You retweet it. You post it on your wall. You forward it, and then you go back to work.
If only science had something concrete to say about the whole thing, you know? All these living greeting cards dispensing wisdom are great and all, but what about really putting money to the test? Does money buy happiness? In 2010, scientists published the results of a study looking into that very question.
The research by Daniel Kahneman and Angus Deaton, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, analyzed the lives and incomes of nearly half-a-million randomly selected U.S. citizens. They dug through the subjects’ lives searching for indicators of something psychologists call “emotional well being,” a clinical term for how often you feel peaks and valleys like “joy, stress, sadness, anger and affection” and to what degree you feel those things daily. In other words, they measured how happy or sad people were over time compared to how much cash they brought home. They did this by checking if the subjects were consistently able to experience the richness of existence, by whether they were tasting the poetic marrow of life.
The researchers discovered money is indeed a major factor in day-to-day happiness. No surprise there. You need to make a certain amount, on average, to be able to afford food, shelter, clothing, entertainment and the occasional Apple product, but what spun top hats around the country was their finding that beyond a certain point your happiness levels off. The happiness money offers doesn’t keep getting more and more potent – it plateaus. The research showed that a lack of money brings unhappiness, but an overabundance does not have the opposite effect.
According to the research, in modern America the average income required to be happy day-to-day, to experience “emotional well being” is about $75,000 a year. According to the researchers, past that point adding more to your income “does nothing for happiness, enjoyment, sadness, or stress.” A person who makes, on average, $250,000 a year has no greater emotional well-being, no extra day-to-day happiness, than a person making $75,000 a year. In Mississippi it is a bit less, in Chicago a bit more, but the point is there is evidence for the existence of a financiohappiness ceiling. The super-wealthy may believe they are happier, and you may agree, but you both share a delusion.
If you don’t already have it, money can improve your life and make you happier, but once you have enough to go to Red Lobster on Tuesday night without worrying about paying the water bill that month, you’re good to go. Or, as Henry David Thoreau once said, “A man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone.” In the modern United States the ability to let most things alone, according to Kahneman and Deaton’s research, costs about $75,000 a year.
If you find that hard to believe, you aren’t alone. A study in 2011 at Cornell asked Americans which they would rather have, more money or more sleep. Most people said more money. In a choice between either $80,000 a year, normal work hours, and about eight hours of sleep a night versus $140,000 a year, routine overtime, and six hours of nightly dreams – the majority of people went with the cash. It’s unfortunate, because although it looks good on paper and feels right in your gut, the research has never agreed. No matter how you turn it, the science says once your basic needs are taken care of, money and other rewards don’t make you happier, and you can appreciate why after examining a psychological jewel called the overjustification effect. To understand it, we must travel to 1973 when a group of psychologists poisoned a few children’s love of drawing in the name of science.
Time Magazine in 1971
Throughout the 20th century, as psychology came into its own as a scientific discipline, many psychologists emerged from the halls of academia and ascended to the rank of celebrity after delivering open-palmed scientific slaps to the face of mankind. Sigmund Freud got people talking about the unconscious and the malleable, hidden world of desires and fears. Carl Jung put the ideas of archetypes, introversion, and extroversion into our vocabulary. Abraham Maslow gave us a hierarchy of needs including hugs and sex. Timothy Leary fed Harvard students psychedelic mushrooms and advocated that an entire generation should use LSD to “turn on, tune in, and drop out.” There are many more, but in the 1970s, B.F. Skinner was the rock star of psychology.
Skinner and his boxes made the cover of Time magazine in 1971 underneath the ominous proclamation, “We Can’t Afford Freedom.” His research into behaviorism had made its way into the public consciousness, and he was intent on using his celebrity to convince all of humanity there was no such thing as free will. You’ve seen his findings in practice. The Supernanny and The Dog Whisperer reward desired behavior and either punish or ignore undesired behavior – and they get impressive results. Skinner could make birds do figure eights on his command, or train them to pilot guided missiles. He invented climate-controlled baby boxes in which infants never cried. He created teaching machines that still influence user interfaces today. But, he also scared a romantic generation of freedom seekers into thinking freedom might be an illusion.
Skinner said all human thoughts and behaviors were just reactions to stimuli – conditioned responses. To believe as Skinner did is to believe everything you do is part of seeking a reward or avoiding a punishment. Your entire life is just a stack of evolutionarily selected against quirks and desires seasoned with programmed interests and fears. There is no self. There is no one in control. Those things are illusions, side effects of a complex nervous system observing its own actions and cognitions. In light of this, Skinner advocated we build a society through setting goals and then condition people toward those goals through positive reinforcement. Skinner didn’t trust human beings not to be lazy, greedy, and violent. Humans, he said, were inclined to seek and reinforce status through institutions, class warfare, and bloodshed. People can’t be trusted with freedom, he told the world. Psychology could instead design systems to condition people toward positive goals that ensure the best possible quality of life for all.
As you might imagine, the proclamation humans have no soul, or at least no special spark, caused a great deal of mental indigestion. Many psychologists resisted the idea that you are nothing more than chemical reactions on top of physical laws playing themselves out no differently than a rock slide crashing down the side of a mountain or a tree converting sunlight and carbon dioxide into wood. Skinner claimed what goes on inside your head is irrelevant, that the environment, the stuff outside your skull determines behavior, thoughts, emotions, beliefs and so on. It was a bold and terrifying claim to many, so science set about the task of picking it apart.
Among those who wanted to know if the mind was just a pile of reactions to rewards and punishments were psychologists Mark Lepper, Daniel Greene and Richard Nisbett. They wondered if thinking about thinking played a bigger role than the behaviorists suggested. In their book, The Hidden Costs of Reward, they detail one experiment in particular which helped pull psychology out from under what they called Skinner’s “long shadow.”
In 1973, Lepper, Greene and Nisbett met with teachers of a preschool class, the sort that generates a steady output of macaroni art and paper-bag vests. They arranged for the children to have a period of free time in which the tots could choose from a variety of different fun activities. Meanwhile, the psychologists would watch from behind a one-way mirror and take notes. The teachers agreed, and the psychologists watched. To proceed, they needed children with a natural affinity for art. So as the kids played, the scientists searched for the ones who gravitated toward drawing and coloring activities. Once they identified the artists of the group, the scientists watched them during free time and measured their participation and interest in drawing for later comparison.
They then divided the children into three groups. They offered Group A a glittering certificate of awesomeness if the artists drew during the next fun time. They offered Group B nothing, but if the kids in Group B happened to draw they received an unexpected certificate of awesomeness identical to the one received by Group A. The experimenters told Group C nothing ahead of time, and later the scientists didn’t award a prize if those children went for the colored pencils and markers. The scientists then watched to see how the kids performed during a series of playtimes over three days. They awarded the prizes, stopped observations, and waited two weeks. When they returned, the researchers watched as the children faced the same the choice as before the experiment began. Three groups, three experiences, many fun activities – how do you think their feelings changed?
Source: Benedikte on Flikr
Well, Group B and Group C didn’t change at all. They went to the art supplies and created monsters and mountains and houses with curly-cue smoke streams crawling out of rectangular chimneys with just as much joy as they had before they met the psychologists. Group A, though, did not. They were different people now. The children in Group A “spent significantly less time” drawing than did the others, and they “showed a significant decrease in interest in the activity” as compared to before the experiment. Why?
The children in Group A were swept up, overpowered, their joy perverted by the overjustification effect. The story they told themselves wasn’t the same story the other groups were telling. That’s how the effect works.
Self-perception theory says you observe your own behavior and then, after the fact, make up a story to explain it. That story is sometimes close to the truth, and sometimes it is just something nice that makes you feel better about being a person. For instance, researchers at Stanford University once divided students into two groups. One received a small cash payment for turning wooden knobs round and round for an hour. The other group received a generous payment for the same task. After the hour, a researcher asked students in each group to tell the next person after them who was about to perform the same boring task that turning knobs was fun and interesting. After that, everyone filled out a survey in which they were asked to say how they truly felt. The people paid a pittance reported the study was a blast. The people paid well reported it was awful. Subjects in both groups lied to the person after them, but the people paid well had a justification, an extrinsic reward to fall back on. The other group had no safety net, no outside justification, so they invented one inside. To keep from feeling icky, they found solace in an internal justification – they thought, “you know, it really was fun when you think about.” That’s called the insufficient justification effect, the yang to overjustification’s yin. In telling themselves the story, the only difference was the size of the reward and whether or not they felt extrinsically or intrinsically motivated. You are driven at the fundamental level in most everything you choose to do by either intrinsic or extrinsic goals.
Intrinsic motivations come from within. As Daniel Pink explained in his excellent book, Drive, those motivations often include mastery, autonomy, and purpose. There are some things you do just because they fulfill you, or they make you feel like you are becoming better at a task, or that you are a master of your destiny, or that you play a role in the grand scheme of things, or that you are helping society in some way. Intrinsic rewards demonstrate to yourself and others the value of being you. They are blurry and difficult to quantify. Charted on a graph, they form long slopes stretching into infinity. You strive to become an amazing cellist, or you volunteer in the campaign of an inspiring politician, or you build the starship Enterprise in Minecraft.
Extrinsic motivations come from without. They are tangible baubles handed over for tangible deeds. They usually exist outside of you before you begin a task. These sorts of motivations include money, prizes and grades, or in the case of punishment, the promise of losing something you like or gaining something you do not. Extrinsic motivations are easy to quantify, and can be demonstrated in bar graphs or tallied on a calculator. You work a double shift for the overtime pay so you can make rent. You put in the hours to become a doctor hoping your father will finally deliver the praise for which you long. You say no to the cheesecake so you can fit into those pants at the Christmas party. If you can admit to yourself that the reward is the only reason you are doing what you are doing – the situps, the spreadsheet, the speed limit – it is probably extrinsic.
Whether a reward is intrinsic or extrinsic helps determine the setting of your narrative – the marketplace or the heart. As Dan Ariely writes in his book, Predictably Irrational, you tend to unconsciously evaluate your behavior and that of others in terms of social norms or market norms. Helping a friend move for free doesn’t feel the same as helping a friend move for $50. It feels wonderful to slip into the same bed with your date after getting to know them and staying up one night making key lime cupcakes and talking about the differences and similarities between Breaking Bad and The Wire, but if after all of that the other person tosses you a $100 bill and says, “Thanks, that was awesome,” you will feel crushed by the terrible weight of market norms. Payments in terms of social norms are intrinsic, and thus your narrative remains impervious to the overjustification effect. Those sorts of payments come as praise and respect, a feeling of mastery or camaraderie or love. Payments in terms of market norms are extrinsic, and your story becomes vulnerable to overjustification. Marketplace payments come as something measurable, and in turn they make your motivation measurable when before it was nebulous, up for interpretation and easy to rationalize.
The deal the children struck with the experimenters ruined their love of art during playtime, not because they received a reward. After all, Group B got the same reward and kept their desire to draw. No, it wasn’t the prize but the story they told themselves about why they chose what they chose, why they did what they did. During the experiment, Group C thought, “I just drew this picture because I love to draw!” Group B thought, “I just got rewarded for doing something I love to do!” Group A thought, “I just drew this to win an award!” When all three groups were faced with the same activity, Group A was faced with a metacognition, a question, a burden unknown to the other groups. The scientists in the knob-turning study and the child artists study showed Skinner’s view was too narrow. Thinking about thinking changes things. Extrinsic rewards can steal your narrative.
As Lepper, Greene and Nisbett wrote, “engagement in an activity of initial interest under conditions that make salient to the person the instrumentality of engagement in that activity as a means to some ulterior end may lead to decrements in subsequent, intrinsic interest in the activity.” In other words, if you are offered a reward to do something you love and then agree, you will later question whether you continue to do it for love or for the reward.
Source: www.trollandtoad.com
In 1980, David Rosenfield, Robert Folger and Harold Adelman at Southern Methodist University revealed a way you can defeat the overjustification effect. Seek employers who dole out reward – paychecks, bonuses, promotions, etc. – based not on quotas or task completions but instead based on competence. They ran an experiment in which they told subjects the goal was to find fun and interesting ways to improve vocabulary skills in schools. They placed participants in two categories and two groups per category. In one category, subjects would be paid for being good at their task. In the other category, the subjects would be paid for completing a task. The subjects received 26 dice with letters on their faces instead of dots and a stack of index cards each with 13 random letters. The subjects hit a timer and used their dice to make words from the letters on the cards. Once they had used nine letters or spent a minute-and-a-half trying, they moved on to the next index card and kept repeating until the experiment ended. It was difficult but fun, and as the players kept going they started to improve in their abilities.
In the payment for competence category, Group A was told they were being payed based on how well they did compared to the average score. In Group B, the subjects were told the same thing, but there was no mention of any reward. In the payment for completion category, the scientists told Group C each completed puzzle would increase their payout, and Group D was told they would be paid by the hour.
After the games, the experimenters pretended to tally up the subjects’ scores and showed Groups A and B how well they did. No matter how they actually performed, the scientists told half of Groups A and B they did poorly and half they were amazing at the game. Groups C and D, the ones who were paid for completions, were also split. Half got low pay and half high pay. The subjects then filled out a questionnaire and sat alone in the room with the dice and cards for three minutes. During that alone time the real study began. The scientists wanted to see who would keep playing the game for fun and for how long.
The people in Groups A and B, the ones who were paid for being better than average, they picked up the game and played it for over two minutes, but slightly less than that if they were told they weren’t that good. The people in groups C and D, the ones paid for completions, didn’t play it for fun for as long as did the people in the competency groups, and they tended to play longer the less they were paid.
The results of the study suggested when you get rewarded based on how well you perform a task, as long as those reasons are made perfectly clear, rewards will generate that electric exuberance of intrinsic validation, and the higher the reward, the better the feeling and the more likely you will try harder in the future. On the other hand, if you are getting rewarded just for being a warm body, no matter how well you do your job, no matter what you achieve, the electric feeling is absent. In those conditions greater rewards don’t lead to more output, don’t encourage you to strive for greatness. Overall, the study suggested rewards don’t have motivational power unless they make you feel competent. Money alone doesn’t do that. With money, when you explain to yourself why you worked so hard, all you can come up with is, “to get paid.” You come to believe you are being coerced, paid off, bought out. In the absence of what the scientists called “competency feedback” there is no story to tell yourself that paints you as a badass. Quotas and overtime and hourly pay don’t offer such indications of competency. Bonuses based on a reaching a specific number of completions or reaching a quantified goal make you feel like a machine.
If you pay people to complete puzzles instead of paying them for being smart, they lose interest in the game. If you pay children to draw, fun becomes work. Payment on top of compliments and other praise and feeling good about personal achievement are powerful motivators, but only if they are unexpected. Only then can you continue to tell the story that keeps you going; only then can you still explain your motivation as coming from within.
Consider the story you tell yourself about why you do what you do for a living. How vulnerable is that tale to these effects?
Maybe your story goes like this: Work is just a means to an end. You go to work; you get paid. You exchange effort for survival tokens and the occasional steampunk thong from Etsy. Work is not fun. Work pays bills. Fun happens at places that are not work. Your story is in no danger if that’s how you see things. In an environment like that Skinner’s assumptions hold true, you will only work as hard as is necessary to keep getting paychecks. If offered greater rewards, you’ll work harder for them.
Maybe your story goes like this though: I love what I do. It changes lives. It makes the world a better place. I am slowly becoming a master in my field, and I get to choose how I solve problems. My bosses value my efforts, depend on me, and offer praise. In that scenario, rewards just get in the way of your job. As Kahneman’s and Deaton’s study about happiness showed, once you earn enough to be happy day-to-day, motivation must come from something else. As Kahneman and Deaton’s research into happiness and money showed, the only material reward worth seeking once you have a bed, running water and access to microwave popcorn, are tributes, symbols to all of your merit, stuff that demonstrates your effectance to yourself and others. Ranks, degrees, gold stars, trophies, Nobel Prizes and Academy Awards – these are shorthand indicators of your competence. Those rewards amplify your internal motivations; they build your self-esteem and strengthen your feelings of self-efficacy. They show you’ve leveled up in the real world. Achievement unlocked. They help you construct a personal narrative you enjoy telling.
The overjustification effect threatens your fragile narratives, especially if you haven’t figured out what to do with your life. You run the risk of seeing your behavior as motivated by profit instead of interest if you agree to get paid for something you would probably do for free. Conditioning will not only fail, it will pollute you. You run the risk of believing the reward, not your passion, was responsible for your effort, and in the future it will be a challenge to generate enthusiasm. It becomes more and more difficult to look back on your actions and describe them in terms of internal motivations. The thing you love can become drudgery if that which can’t be measured is transmuted into something you can plug into TurboTax.
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Links:
The Starship Enterprise in Minecraft
The WSJ’s Writeup on the Happiness Study
Economic Growth and Subjective Well-Being
The Official Website of B.F. Skinner
RSA Animate: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us
Steve Jobs’ Commencement Speech at Stanford
A Meta-Analysis of The Overjustification Effect
I think a lot of people are getting confused. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with getting paid for what you love to do, it’s the idea of the motivation. For instance, I love what I do, and I don’t really give a damn (or, for that matter, even know) how much I get paid. The pay has never been part of the mental reward structure. If you work at something you love, you have to divorce the extrinsic rewards and the intrinsic.
When I was about thirteen, I finished a chore, and my step-father handed me ten dollars. I asked, “Why didn’t you say thank you?” and he said, “Take the ten dollars. In the real world, that’s all the thanks you’re ever going to get.” I refused to believe the world was like that, and I’ve never let it be like that for me. So all of my value is in what I do. (And I always make it a point to say thank you to anyone I see doing a good job.)
Am I the one misreading this study?
What if wanting to be good at something is your motivation? When you know you are competent to pursue in the career you want or a task, you start to enjoy what you do because you have the skills to do whatever. Is that extrinsic?
No, I think that is intrinsic — your motivation is coming from your own perception of your own competence. I get a sense of soaring satisfaction when I play Moonlight Sonata because I always thought I was a crap pianist. I AM a crap pianist — a five year old could play better than me — but I get the joy of knowing that I’ve learned to play something and the satisfaction of playing it for my friends.
A lot of careers are like that too — at each new stage you demonstrate skills and competence and you learn as you go along, and that’s what gives people the satisfaction.
I think one of the reasons so many people in my field choose to work ridiculously long hours outside of what they are paid for is to “prove” to themselves (and everyone else) that they are doing the work because they love it. Unfortunately that then becomes the norm, and those few people who aren’t able or prepared to put long hours in are kind of sneered at behind their backs. Like they aren’t doing it for the “right” reasons. It becomes a bit of a pathetic cult, if you ask me.
It’s an interesting point about spontaneous reward becoming a greater symbol of success than financial reward. More and more people seem to be motivated specifically by the hope of winning certain awards in my field, and hitting certain career milestones to prove they are valued. I wonder if the perceived worth of those awards and milestones have mushroomed up everywhere BECAUSE of all those trite maxims about following your dreams etc. If the maxims went something like, “do what you love… even if you never get a scrap of recognition from anyone, anywhere, ever,” I think the uptake rate of certain degree courses and volunteer schemes would drop sharply.
That would be an interesting social experiment, right there.
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Apparently I **AM** not so smart because I found that incredibly hard to follow — a few charts or graphs might have helped — and then got to the end and found my motivations/perception of work uncatered for. *sigh*
As someone with a familiarity in psych and pursuing one’s passion to finally get stable (financially and professionally) in the real world by doing something one loves. This article is definitely something I can relate to, not only that but it also makes me wary of treading along the fine line of my personal narratives in life.
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I like Where does Government get its Money? Federal Way Conservative very interesting.
I’ll complain which you have copied material from a different supply
All along I thought only I had this problem, It happened to me every time, first I start doing something for pleasure, as I got better at it, eventually I would get paid for it, and then quickly loose interest and came up with justifications so despite the amount of reward offered I would decline. I see now this is quite common and it is not just happening to me.
This makes me think probably one of the biggest problem of humanity is that we don’t talk about these things with each other, because we feel embarrassed or whatever and opt to hide them inside. Perhaps we do that because in this money driven world we live in today, we are afraid people would call you a lunatic, if you told them, getting payed for something ruined all the fun and made me not wanting to do it anymore.
I am an artist I sell digital art for a living and because digital art can be copied over and over, I ended up selling stock artwork, and even if I don’t do anything they keep selling. When I got to a point where money was enough to live I stopped doing anything. Basically I haven’t done anything in 5 years or so and all this time, there is a war inside my head about it, because I know if I do more I will get more, but I never understood, until now, why that doesn’t seem to be motivation, on the contrary. I quickly found me a justification to make me feel less guilty like I am against money consumerist society, I don’t want to sell my soul like everybody else, whatever, stuff like that, but also felt guilty every time i can’t afford something, when I think about “I could have had the money if i accepted whatever job I rejected because they wanted to pay me. Your article surely is something for me to reflect on, and I’m pretty sure it will help me overcome this eventually, thank you!
Thanks again for a wonderful post. I am currently “studying” for a test in a course called “The Mind.” It’s my second year of medical school and I am having to start choosing a path of specialization or primary care. Every physician survey I read shows certain jobs have more happiness to them… and they usually make less money. Now I won’t be as afraid to go for them. :)
Pretty spot-on.
My entire life, I wanted to do the thing I now do for a living. It took years of work to get to the point to where I was making a living doing the thing I used to do for free. But it turned out to be a low-income job for all but a small percentage who make it to the top of that field. And the people in charge keep it low income by telling me (and others) I’m “lucky” because I do what I love for a living, albeit a very poor one. Yet the income doesn’t compare to the output, so I find myself now unhappy doing for a living the very thing I used to love to do as a hobby.
I’m inclined to argue ones love for the task to wane because the process of money taking for it allows other people to demand you do the task when they want you to, NOT when you want to. It’s obvious that when you are forced to do something you like, you’ll begin not liking it.
Fantastic post – certainly timely in a society where the pursuit of happiness for happiness sake has evolved into something of a competitive sport. Advertising mastered linking products and status with happiness, and now facebook, twitter and so on providing 24/7 reminders that there is someone in your network ‘proving’ they are happy, the sport of happiness has been turbocharged. Your post is a timely reminder that the enhanced transparency of others happiness, has made the ability to self-assess the line between a true intrinsic motivation or the extrinsic motivation of ‘keeping up’ much more difficult to determine.
I will never help a friend move for $50 again!
Very well said. Especially the bit about social networks consistently showing you someone else doing it better than you. This whole happiness pursuit sport is like a dog chasing its own tail.
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Reblogged this on Shariefm's Blog and commented:
A reversal of prevalent ‘wisdom’ in pop psychology.
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And that is why politicians should only be paied a minimum wage.
Amazing.
This is a quote form the paper by Daniel Kahneman and Angus Deaton:
“We report an analysis of more than 450,000 responses
to the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index, a daily survey of
1,000 US residents conducted by the Gallup Organization”
The sample is 1 thousand people, who were asked the same questions every day for over 450 days.
It’s just a technicality, but I think it’s important. The fewer the sample, the less reliable the conclusions. If the sample were almost half a million people, it’s conclusions would be very reliable.