Why Education Kills Curiosity: Intrinsic vs Extrinsic Motivation
A high school student finishes two years early, knows everything about Harvard and Stanford admissions, and yet has no idea why he’s studying math. That moment told me everything about what education has become.
(Below is a snippet of Actionable Gamification: Beyond Points, Badges, and Leaderboards. If you like this post, you will LOVE the book.)
Table of Contents
About the Creator of the Octalysis Framework
Yu-kai Chou created the Octalysis Framework after studying gamification since 2003, years before the term entered mainstream vocabulary. As a Human-Systems Architect & Behavioral Designer, his framework has been applied by LEGO, Microsoft, Porsche, Coca-Cola, Salesforce, and MrBeast, impacting over 1.5 Billion Users.
Chou has taught the Octalysis methodology at Harvard, Stanford, Yale, Tesla, Google, BCG, and IDEO.
His work has been cited by Harvard, Stanford, MIT, Forbes, Wall Street Journal, Wired, US Department of Energy, NIST, NSF, NCBI, US Department of Education, ClinicalTrials.gov, and 3,700+ more academic publications. Explore his books here.
The Shift from Curiosity to Compliance
The negative shift from Intrinsic Motivation to Extrinsic Motivation is a big issue within our educational systems.
I hold a firm belief that we as a species are endowed with an innate desire to learn, often driven by Core Drive 7: Unpredictability & Curiosity, a Right Brain Core Drive, and Core Drive 3: Empowerment of Creativity & Feedback, the Right Brain desire to use that knowledge in different ways.
However, when it comes to school and training, that intrinsic motivation to learn quickly shifts into the extrinsic desire to obtain good grades, appease parents and teachers, gain respect from classmates, and secure prestigious, career-requisite diplomas. All of which are powered by Left Brain Core Drives such as Core Drive 2: Development & Accomplishment and Core Drive 4: Ownership & Possession.
Because of this, students often stop caring about the learning itself and do the minimum amount of work to achieve those extrinsic results (which sometimes involves copying each others’ homework or cheating on tests).
They may even forget why they are learning the material in the first place.
The Student Who Didn’t Know Why He Studied Math
In early 2014, I had a research interview with a high school senior student on a variety of games. He was an overachieving student who was finishing high school two years earlier than his peers.
He knew just about everything there was to know concerning the elite universities he was applying to. Over the course of our conversation, he stated (paraphrasing of course), “Well, Stanford is great at these things, but I’m not sure about this. Harvard is okay on this subject matter, but they have an amazing program that could help my future.”
Then, somewhere in the conversation, I mentioned that math is a useful subject to prepare for one’s career. To my surprise, this teenager who was polite and enthusiastic the entire time suddenly responded in an almost disdainful way:
“Come on Yu-kai. When do people ever use advanced math after graduating from school?”
I felt I had to justify myself: “I’m serious. Math is really useful. If you want to be a scientist, you need to use a lot of advanced math.”
His eyes widened up. “Really?”
“Yeah, of course. You need math to calculate sound waves, gravity, satellite positioning information and such. Also, you need math if you want to become an engineer, economist, or even an accountant. How else would you tell the President that the economy would dry up if he doesn’t bail out certain banks for nine billion dollars, or calculate how many days it takes for an asteroid the size of Texas to hit earth?” I said.
He exclaimed, “Wow, I never thought about that, but it makes a lot of sense!”
So here is a teenager who is doing everything he is supposed to do: get good grades, get good SAT scores, participate in extracurricular activities, write strong essays on his college applications, and research the schools he wants to attend.
And yet, he does not know why he is studying math beyond the goals of getting into a good college and perhaps securing a good job.
It was eye-opening for me to see how bad the impact of goal-oriented education was on our learning. I can say this from my own experience: many students who neglect school and get in trouble all the time aren’t like that because they are stupid or dislike learning.
They just don’t see the purpose of learning the subjects that are taught in class.
Office Hours Expose the Problem
All too often, this tendency is present at the college level. I do a fair amount of work with universities to improve their educational methodologies.
I often ask professors about the students that attend their office hours. If humans were so passionate about learning, you would expect that these students should be thrilled that there’s a professor who is brilliant, has spent decades researching a subject, and is dedicating their time just to transfer that knowledge!
With this in mind, every student should be excited about the opportunity to visit every single office hour and pick the professors’ brains. (For some reason, I’ve always felt this phrase to be rather gory in a Hannibal Lecter kind of way.)
As it turns out, the majority of their students that actually show up are only there when they have problems with their grades. Either they are approaching the professor because they are about to fail the course, or because they feel the professor incorrectly graded their tests and want to get their points back.
As a result of this extrinsic focus, students often forget what they learned immediately after their exams.
The 400% Improvement Nobody Wants
When I was a student, I once told a few friends, “Did you know that, since most people forget the majority of what they have learned shortly after a test, if you simply retained most of it instead, you are immediately several times better than everyone else? That’s not just a 20% or 30% improvement. It could be a 400% improvement! What else can you do to quickly become that much better than others in the same major?”
To my surprise, my friends responded, “Wow, that’s true Yu-kai! But… what’s the point? We’ve already finished the test.”
At the time, I wasn’t sure how to respond to a statement like that, but I’m guessing the most appropriate response would have been, “You’re wrong. You still have to remember it for the Final Exam!”
You can see that Extrinsic Motivation design and goals has clearly taken its toll on our desire to learn and curiously explore subject matters that benefit our society.
What This Means for Motivation Design
The education system isn’t broken because teachers are bad or students are lazy. It’s broken because the entire system runs on Left Brain (Extrinsic) Core Drives while starving the Right Brain (Intrinsic) ones.
Grades are Core Drive 2 stripped of meaning. Diplomas are Core Drive 4 without connection to the craft. Neither activates the curiosity (Core Drive 7) or creative expression (Core Drive 3) that made learning exciting in the first place.
As I discuss in How Rewards Kill Our Creativity, when you layer extrinsic rewards on top of intrinsically motivated behavior, you can actually destroy the original motivation. Education does this at industrial scale.
The solution isn’t to remove all structure. It’s to design the structure so that extrinsic motivators support intrinsic ones instead of replacing them. That’s what the Octalysis Framework is built to do.
Related Reading
- The Octalysis Framework for Gamification & Behavioral Design
- Left Brain (Extrinsic) vs Right Brain (Intrinsic) Core Drives in Gamification
- How Rewards Kill Our Creativity
- Top 10 Education Gamification Examples for Lifelong Learners
- What is Gamification?
- When to Use Black Hat Gamification Design
- Books by Yu-kai Chou