Rahul Vohra: evaluation

Transcript context

…Makes all sense. Without jumping in too many conclusions here, I'm just going to assume that me getting through my inbox on its own is an intrinsic motivation. Whereas you would be introducing extrinsic motivators if you introduce some badging system or something and that, I would guess is just not as sustainable, enduring, and motivating. Exactly. Perhaps the counterintuitive conclusion is that extrinsic motivation can actually undermine our intrinsic motivation. We can be less infused to do a thing once we're being extrinsically motivated. This is why sometimes, if you take someone who has a hobby and you pay them to do it, they start to lose interest in the hobby. There was this fascinating study that we should go into because it really outlines this in the clearest way possible back in the 1970s. Researchers from Stanford, they recruited children. These were young kids. They were aged about 3–4 years old. The thing that made all of these kids in common is that they were generally interested in drawing. Some of these kids were told they would get a reward—a certificate with a gold seal and a ribbon. Some of these kids were not told about any reward, and so they did not expect one or even know of one. The researchers then invited all of these children into a separate room to draw for six minutes. Afterwards, they would either get the reward or not, depending on which group they were in. Over the next few days, the children were observed to see how much they would continue to draw by themselves. Now here's the thing, the children with no reward spent 17% of their time drawing, but the children who expected a reward, the ones who have received compensation (so to speak) only spent 8% of their time drawing. In other words, the extrinsic reward had literally halved their motivation. You can back out of this into intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivation and the definitions are as follows. With intrinsic motivation, we do things because they are inherently interesting and satisfying. With extrinsic motivation, we do things to earn rewards and achieve external goals. That's the problem with rewards, they massively undermine intrinsic motivation. That's why gamification does not work, and when gamification does work, it is because the underlying experience was already a game. To go back to RuneScape, when getting that next piece of loot in Diablo fashion or leveling up in World of Warcraft fashion feels good, it's because you're actually playing a pretty decent game. In Superhuman, when you hit inbox zero and you feel that emotion of that joyous imagery and that feels like gamification and it works. It is because Superhuman itself was designed like a game, not because there was a game mechanic laid on top. If I could extrapolate this for founders out there who are listening, product designers, or product managers who want to work this into their own product, is it basically find the opportunities where your product naturally delights someone or naturally makes someone feel a sense of accomplishment and find the light-touch ways to just amplify that?…

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