Psychological Science Agenda (/science/about/psa/) | June 2018 (/science/about/psa/2018/06/)

SCIENCE BRIEF

The science of motivation

Multidisciplinary approaches advance research on the nature
and effects of motivation.
By Kou Murayama, PhD (https://www.apa.org/search?query=&fq=ContributorFilt:%22Murayama,
Kou%22&sort=ContentDateSort desc)
Kou Murayama is an associate professor at the University of Reading,
heading the multidisciplinary Motivation Science lab with the aim of
achieving an integrative understanding of human motivation. He obtained
his PhD at the University of Tokyo as an educational psychologist, and
thereafter expanded his expertise and research scope (to include such areas as social
psychology, cognitive psychology, cognitive neuroscience and psychometrics) through
postdoctoral positions at four different institutions in three different countries (Japan, the
United States, Germany). His honors include the Richard E. Snow Award for Early
Contributions from Div. 15 (Educational Psychology) of the American Psychological
Association, the F.J. McGuigan Early Career Investigator Prize from the American
Psychological Foundation, and the Transforming Education Through Neuroscience
Award from the Learning & the Brain Foundation. He has recently started a large project
on the nature of human curiosity and intrinsic rewards, funded by the Leverhulme Trust.
Author website (http://koumurayama.com/) .

Motivation is important in almost every aspect of human behavior. When you make a
decision, your choice is certainly influenced by your motivational state. When you study
mathematics, your motivation to study mathematics clearly affects the way you learn it.
Despite its obvious importance, empirical research on motivation has been segregated
in different areas for long years, making it difficult to establish an integrative view on
motivation. For example, I studied a number of motivation theories proposed in
educational psychology (as my PhD is in educational psychology) but these theories are
not connected with the motivational theories studied in social psychology or
organizational psychology. Furthermore, the way motivation is defined and theorized is
fundamentally different in cognitive/affective neuroscience (Murayama, in press). In other
fields such as cognitive psychology, motivation has been normally treated as a nuisance
factor that needs to be controlled (see Simon, 1994).

The times have changed, however. In recent years, researchers have recognized the
importance of more unified and cross-disciplinary approach to study motivation (Braver
et al., 2014). This multidisciplinary, multimethod pursuit, called Motivation Science, is now
an emerging field (Kruglanski, Chemikova & Kopez, 2015). Our Motivation Science lab
(http://koumurayama.com/) takes an integrative approach, drawing from multiple disciplines
(e.g., cognitive, social and educational psychology, cognitive/social neuroscience) and
multiple approaches (e.g., behavioral experiments, longitudinal data analysis,
neuroimaging, meta-analysis, statistical simulation/computational modeling, network
analysis ). We explore a number of overlapping basic and applied research questions
with the ultimate goal of providing an integrated view on human motivation.

Motivation and learning

If you are motivated, you learn better and remember more of what you learned. This
sounds like an obvious fact, but our lab showed that the reality is more nuanced. The
critical fact is that not all motivations are created equal.

In the literature of achievement goals, for example, people study primarily for two
different goals — to master materials and develop their competence, which are called
mastery goals, and to perform well in comparison to others, which are called
performance goals (Dweck, 1986; Nicholls, 1984). Mastery goals and performance goals
represent the same overall quantity of motivation, but they are qualitatively distinct types
of motivation. We conducted a series of behavioral experiments to examine how these
two different types of motivation influence learning (Murayama & Elliot, 2011).

In the study, participants were engaged in a problem-solving task and received a

surprise memory test related to the task. Critically, participants performed the problem-
solving task with different goals. Participants in the mastery goal condition were told that
the goal was to develop their cognitive ability through the task, whereas those in the
performance goal condition were told that their goal was to demonstrate their ability
relative to other participants. The participants in the performance goal condition showed
better memory performance in an immediate memory test, but when the memory was
assessed one week later, participants in the mastery goal condition showed better
memory performance. These results indicate that performance goals help short-term
learning, whereas mastery goals facilitate long-term learning.

That was a laboratory study where the learning situation was somewhat artificial. To
further test whether mastery orientation facilitates long-term learning, we turned to an
existing longitudinal survey dataset. In this study, we used longitudinal survey data on
more than 3,000 schoolchildren from German schools (Murayama, Pekrun, Lichtenfeld &
vom Hofe, 2013). Using latent growth curve modeling, we showed that items which focus
on the performance aspect of learning (“In math I work hard, because I want to get good
grades”) in Grade 7 predicted the immediate math achievement score whereas items
focusing on the mastery aspect of learning (“I invest a lot of effort in math, because I am
interested in the subject”) in Grade 7 predicted the growth in math achievement scores
over three years. These results mirror our findings from the lab, providing convergent
evidence that mastery-based motivation supports long-term learning whereas
performance-based motivation only helps short-term learning.

With some additional neuroimaging and behavioral experiments, we are now examining
the underlying mechanisms of this time dependent effect of motivation (Ikeda, Castel, &
Murayama, 2015; Murayama et al., 2015).

Reward and motivation

Do rewards enhance learning outcomes? This is a question that has long sparked
controversy in education literature. According to recent findings in cognitive
neuroscience, the answer seems to be yes. Indeed, there have been a number of
studies, including ours (Murayama & Kitagami, 2014), that have shown that rewards (e.g.,
money) enhance learning due to the modulation of hippocampal function by the reward
network in the brain (Adcock, Thangavel, Whitfield-Gabrielli, Knutson & Gabrieli, 2006).
On this basis, some argue for the value of reward in education (Howard-Jones & Jay,
2016).

But research in social psychology has also found that extrinsic rewards can sometimes
undermine intrinsic motivation when people are engaged in an interesting task. This
phenomenon, called the undermining effect or overjustification effect (Deci, Koestner &
Ryan, 1999; Lepper, Greene & Nisbett, 1973), suggests that extrinsic rewards are not
always beneficial for learning.
To demonstrate this possibility, we replicated the undermining effect using a
neuroimaging method (Murayama, Matsumoto, Izuma & Matsumoto, 2010). Participants
were randomly assigned to a reward group or a control group and engaged in a game
task while being scanned inside an fMRI machine. Participants in the reward group were
instructed that they would receive performance-based monetary rewards whereas
participants in the control condition did not receive such instructions (i.e., they played
the game just for fun). After the scanning session, we found that participants in the
reward group showed less voluntary engagement in the task than those in the control
group, indicating that their intrinsic motivation for the task was undermined by the
introduction of extrinsic rewards. A follow-up brain imaging session showed that the
undermining effect was reflected in the decreased activation in the striatum, part of the
reward network in the brain.

The undermining effect suggests that rewards may not benefit learning on tasks that
people would perform without extrinsic incentives (i.e., interesting tasks). To directly test
this possibility, we examined learning performance on interesting and boring trivia
questions when participants were rewarded (Murayama & Kuhbandner, 2011). The
results showed that working on a trivia question task for a reward enhanced memory
performance (in comparison to a non-reward condition) after a delay, but this was the
case only for boring trivia questions. This outcome indicates an important limit of the
facilitation of learning by extrinsic rewards — they may be effective only when the task
does not have intrinsic value. As we showed elsewhere, intrinsically interesting tasks are
memorable by themselves (Fastrich, Kerr, Castell & Murayama, in press; McGillivray,
Murayama & Castel, 2015), and rewarding intrinsically interesting learning materials may
be a waste of money (i.e., no benefit of rewards) or even detrimental to later
engagement or performance.

In sum, this line of findings showed a nuanced picture of how rewards facilitate learning.
Surely rewards are effective in motivating people and enhancing learning, and this is
supported by a neural link between the motivation (reward) and memory systems in the
brain. But there are certain conditions, such as when a task is intrinsically interesting,
where rewards may undermine motivation and thus bring no benefits for learning.

Competition and motivation

In our society, it is common for authority figures to introduce competition as a means to
increase people’s motivation and performance. But does this assumption that
competition is an effective way to increase people’s motivation and performance have
an empirical basis? A large empirical literature has addressed the effects of competition
on performance, but these studies have been conducted rather separately and no
integrated theoretical perspective has been offered.

To address this issue, we conducted a meta-analysis to quantitatively synthesize the

previous studies on the effects of competition (Murayama & Elliot, 2012). When we
computed the average effect of competition on performance, with 174 studies (more
than 30,000 participants) including both experimental and survey studies, we found a
very small average effect (r = 0.03, 95% CI = [-.00, .06]). We tried to identify potential
moderating factors, but none emerged. However, we observed considerable variability
in effect sizes across studies.

One straightforward interpretation is that competition has virtually no effects on task

performance. But this does not fit with our phenomenological experience of competition.
When we are placed in competitive situations, we can clearly feel that our motivation is
altered. Therefore, we proposed an alternative motivational model that could explain the
puzzlingly weak competition-performance link.

According to our model, when we face competition, we adopt two different types of
motivational goals: performance-approach goals and performance-avoidance goals
(Elliot & Harackiewicz, 1996). Performance-approach goals are goals that focus on
positive outcomes of the competition (“My goal is to outperform others”) whereas
performance-avoidance goals focus on negative outcomes (“My goal is not to do worse
than others”). Importantly, previous research has shown that performance-approach
goals positively predict task performance whereas performance-avoidance goals
negatively predict performance (Elliot & Church, 1997).

We posited that competition triggers both performance-approach and performance-

avoidance goals, and that these co-activated goals cancel each other out (because they
have opposing effects), producing an ostensiblye weak effect. We tested this “opposing
processes model of competition and performance” with an additional meta-analysis,
longitudinal surveys, and a behavioral experiment, providing strong support for the
model. These results indicate that competition engages multi-faceted motivational
processes, which explains why the introduction of competition does not consistently
bring motivational benefits (see also Murayama & Elliot, 2009).
Curiosity, metamotivation and motivation
contagion
We are currently working on several different projects on motivation, with the core aim
of unraveling the nature and function of intrinsic rewards in human behavior. Although
extrinsic incentives undoubtedly play an important role in shaping our behavior, humans
are endowed with the remarkable capacity to engage in a task without such incentives,
by self-generating intrinsic rewards. Forms of motivation triggered by intrinsic rewards
are often referred to as interest, curiosity or intrinsic motivation. But the psychological
and neural mechanisms underlying the generation of intrinsic rewards are largely
unclear (Braver et al., 2014).

For example, we are currently examining the neural correlates when curiosity leads us to
make a seemingly irrational decision. There are a number of anecdotal stories where
curiosity pushes people to expose themselves knowingly to bad consequences, such as
Pandora’s box, Eve and the forbidden tree, and Orpheus, but this seductive rewarding
power of curiosity has been underexamined in the literature (for exceptions, see Hsee
and Ruan, 2015; Oosterwijk, 2017). In our ongoing project, we present participants with
magic tricks (to induce curiosity) and ask them whether they are willing to take a risk of
receiving electric shock to know the secret behind the magic tricks. The preliminary
findings from our neuroimaging analysis indicated that the striatum is associated with
people’s decision to take such a risk to satisfy their curiosity, suggesting that internal
“rewards” play a critical role for curiosity to guide our decision making.

Although intrinsic rewards and extrinsic rewards play a similar role in some situations,
some aspects of intrinsic rewards are unique. One such aspect is metamotivation.
Metamotivational belief refers to our beliefs and understanding of how motivation works
(Miele & Scholer, 2018; Murayama, 2014; Scholer, Miele, Murayama & Fujita, in press).
Like recent findings on metacognition (Kornell & Bjork, 2008; Murayama, Blake, Kerr &
Castel, 2016), our studies indicate that people are often inaccurate in their beliefs about
the motivating property of intrinsic rewards. Specifically, when we asked participants to
work on a boring task and to make a prediction about how interesting the task would be,
their prediction was inaccurate. Their predicted task engagement was less than their
actual task engagement, indicating that people tend to underestimate their power to
generate intrinsic rewards when faced with boring tasks (Murayama, Kuratomi, Johnsen,
Kitagami & Hatano., under review). This inaccuracy of our metamotivational belief could
partly explain why authority figures are often so reliant on extrinsic rewards to motivate
other people (Murayama et al., 2016).
There may be multiple ways that we generate intrinsic rewards. One may be through
observational effects (Bandura, 1977). Imagine that you have a friend who likes
mathematics. Even if you initially did not like mathematics, observing your friend
enjoying mathematics repeatedly may create a fictive internal reward, making you feel
as if you also like mathematics. We call this motivation contagion (Burgess, Riddell,
Fancourt & Murayama, under review), and we are working on several different
behavioral and neuroimaging studies to explore this idea using a variety of network
analysis methodologies. Through behavioral experiments, diary methods and
computational modeling, our lab also explores other channels through which humans
generate intrinsic rewards (e.g., intrinsic rewards produced by challenging situation).

Conclusion
In sum, motivation matters. But at the same time, we need a comprehensive picture of
how different types of motivation fit and function together to produce behavior. Our
Motivation Science Lab is working to achieve this integrated understanding of human
motivation.

Acknowledgements
The work described here was funded by the Marie Curie Career Integration Grant
(PCIG14-GA-2013-630680), JSPS KAKENHI (15H05401 and 16H06406), a grant from the
American Psychological Foundation (F.J. McGuigan Early Career Investigator Prize),
Leverhulme Trust Project Grant (RPG-2016-146), and Leverhulme Research Leadership
Award (RL-2016-030). I thank my collaborators on these projects, including Andrew
Elliot, Reinhard Pekrun, Alan Castel and Kenji Matsumoto.

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