Overview
The concept of intrinsic motivation refers to the tendency to perceive activities as their own reward rather than the means to an external reward.
History and Context
The term first entered scientific literature in 1950 in a paper titled “Learning and satiation of response in intrinsically motivated complex puzzle performance by monkeys.” The psychologist Harry Harlow observed how some monkeys would learn to solve puzzles without food or praise as external rewards to reinforce the behavior, suggesting that some kind of intrinsic motivation was driving the behavior. In 1959, Robert W. White published a paper that observed many organisms engaging in behaviors that exploratory or playful, and he claimed that the intrinsic motivation was driven by a need for competence and effectance to master one’s environment.
The concept was eventually applied to human psychology and behavior as well. Edward L. Deci performed an experiment in 1971 that found that introducing external rewards for an interesting experiment actually decreased the intrinsic motivation. Two groups of humans were given a puzzle called Soma cubes that were supposedly naturally fun to solve. Group A was given money for each puzzle solved. When participants were left alone, Group B continued playing with the cubes while Group A stopped the moment the money was gone. This was challenging for behaviorists to reconcile, or at least radical behaviorists who argued that organisms were conditioned into actions and motivations entirely based on environmental cues and rewards.
In 1985, Deci and Richard Ryan proposed Self-Determination Theory that posits that humans are driven by three core psychological needs: autonomy, competence, and relatedness. Within this framework, intrinsic motivation came to be defined as activities done for their own sake because of inherent satisfaction rather than separable consequences. Still, the effect of intrinsic motivation is to produce movement towards satisfying autonomy, competence, and relatedness as needs.