Helping Children Succeed: What Works and Why by Paul Tough

Author:Paul Tough [Tough, Paul]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Published: 2016-05-23T22:00:00+00:00

15. Motivation

So why don’t incentives seem to work among the low-motivation, high-poverty students at whom they are often aimed? This is a big question, obviously, one that resonates well beyond the narrow issue of incentive programs. In fact, it takes us back to one of the central questions of this book: How do we motivate low-income children to work harder and persevere in school? Or, digging deeper: How do we motivate anybody to do anything? Economists, when they ponder that question, tend to reach a pretty straightforward conclusion: We motivate people by paying them or by offering some other material incentive. But economists aren’t the only academics who address this subject. Psychologists also spend their days contemplating the question of human motivation, and they often come up with answers that are significantly more nuanced than the default explanations of economists.

The stark fact that complicates incentive studies like Fryer’s is that for children who grow up in difficult circumstances, there already exists a powerful set of material incentives to get a good education. Adults with a high school degree fare far better in life than adults without one. They not only earn more, on average, but they also have more stable families, better health, and less chance of being arrested or incarcerated. Those with college degrees similarly do much better, on average, than those without. Young people know this. And yet when it comes time to make any of the many crucial decisions that affect their likelihood of reaching those educational milestones, young people growing up in adversity often make choices that seem in flagrant opposition to their self-interest, rendering those goals more distant and difficult to attain.

Within the field of psychology, one important body of thought that helps to explain this apparent paradox is self-determination theory, which is the life’s work of Edward Deci and Richard Ryan, two professors of psychology at the University of Rochester. Deci and Ryan came up with the beginnings of their theory in the 1970s, during a moment in the history of psychology when the field was mostly dominated by behaviorists, who believed that people’s actions were governed solely by their motivation to fulfill basic biological needs and thus were highly responsive to straightforward rewards and punishments.

Deci and Ryan, by contrast, argued that we are mostly motivated not by the material consequences of our actions, but by the inherent enjoyment and meaning that those actions bring us, a phenomenon they labeled intrinsic motivation. They identified three key human needs—our need for competence, our need for autonomy, and our need for relatedness, meaning personal connection. And they contended that intrinsic motivation can be sustained only when we feel that those needs are being satisfied.

Deci and Ryan have, over the past few decades, conducted a series of experiments that together demonstrate that external rewards—the kind of material incentives that were at the heart of Fryer’s studies—are not only often ineffective in motivating people to apply themselves to projects over the long term, but in many cases actually are counterproductive.

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