A common question I get when talking about gamification is “how can you tell if people are intrinsically motivated?” Since we can’t really measure people’s motivation, it’s not easy to tell if someon...
Updated 5 months ago
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Hello Adonna,
Thank you for the nice comment and your interest in this topic.
Well, motivation is actually much more general concept in human behavior than gamification. Gamification is just one application that leverages human motivation to drive behaviors. But there are many other applications that leverages motivation—as you said, in the context of social media, customer feedback, etc.
I’m glad that you voice your interest. I’ve spoken at conferences about how to shift people from extrinsically motivated to intrinsically motivated. This topic is also briefly described this in my 2nd books—the science of social 2. I just never got the time to blog about it. I will set aside some time to turn my talk into a blog and hopefully publish it soon. So stay tuned.
As I described in this blog post, extrinsic motivation isn’t inherently bad or anything. In fact it is quite important for the survival and well-being of the human species to be extrinsically motivated. It allows us to be more adaptive to the ever changing environment. The problem is that extrinsic motivation is not a sustainable driver of human behavior in the long run—people eventually find reasons to not carry out the behavior, or become more motivated to do something else. This could be a problem, b/c people’s extrinsic motivation can change fairly quickly, so we may not be able to reliably drive the behavior we want with the same extrinsic motivators (e.g. good grades, money, fame, or other types of ewards).
Businesses are already seeing a huge problem with this, since ~70% of the American workers are not engaged or actively disengaged at work. Companies are struggling to drive performance when so much of their work force are not engaged. This is why there is a huge interest in gamification at work, school, and many other context. I can literally go on for days on this topic. Now, I just need some quiet time to write something cohesive.
You can subscribe my blog to an RSS feed under the Article Options on the top of every post. I don’t think you can subscribed via email, but it should notify you via email when there is new activity on my blog. However, if you follow me on twitter or other social media, you will get updates when new blog posts are published, b/c I’ll usually tweet and share about it.
Anyway, thank you again for your interest. Follow me, or come back in a few weeks. I will definitely do more writing on gamification.