"Intrinsic"

Reading Alfie Kohn’s book, Punished By Rewards, I started to have a few reflections on the meaning of competition, rewards and punishment. This book is quite critical of the ways kids are rewarded for any actions they perform, to the point where the meaning of an activity is lost. The classic example is that of a researcher who rewarded students for art work, only to find later that the kids had completely lost interest in doing art for its own sake, even after the rewards were withdrawn. But another example that sticks with me is a program where pizzas are awarded to kids for reading books. I don’t know who benefits more here: the kids, the libraries, or the pizza stores?

I wonder how a meditative or Buddhist, contemplative perspective would look at all of this. In the meditation sessions, there is a lot of emphasis on process orientation and not doing something with the expectation of results. It’s funny to me because the issue is quite complex for adults. Children often do things with abandon. As long as they are not given special ‘perks’ for doing something, they will often find ways to do things. But I wonder if adults can get away from the notion of extrinsic motivation. Even in spiritual practice, a kind of goal is set up at the very beginning, and it becomes the beginning motivation to practice.

In daily life, there are many examples of extrinsic motivators. To use a simple example: the workplace is always asking employees to account for their numbers. How many of this was done in a day, or how many of something else? As Kohn reflects, none of the performance appraisals ever provides a realistic sense of different styles of work, let alone the quality of the work being displayed. Of course, the numbers still give a ballpark sense of how much an average employee can be expected to do in a day, but it might not say very much about how they work  is being done, or with what care. It is easy to construe figures as absolute measures of the quality of work, when in fact it is not really an exact science.

One solution that many thinkers have put forward is to arrange for more intrinsic motivation. This motivation would involve setting up situations where people can feel free to enjoy an activity for its own sake. It is not easy to do this, but some have suggested to make an experience just challenging enough that people are stimulated enough by the performance of the activity and their involvement in it. It does not matter, at that point, whether the experience has a final reward. In that case, the experience of process itself becomes the reward. This sounds wonderful, but is it easy to teach, let alone implement?  I believe it might be difficult for a group of more than five students, because at that point, diverse needs and interests have to be addressed. Not everyone simply has the intrinsic motivation to partake in a shared activity, for example, so the teacher would need to arrange for a variety of interests to be represented in the classroom.

From my understanding of Chan, it is not so easy to say whether Chan (or Zen) favors an intrinsic learning approach, where people are fully ‘engaged’ in something without external rewards. There are two reasons for this. One reason is that intrinsic motivation always creates the possibility to become attached and suffer vexations from that attachment to some experience. It seems a great truth in Buddhism that suffering is a part of existence, no matter where a person goes. Promising an enriching experience through ‘intrinsic’ motivation is sometimes setting people up for disappointment, because most experiences are a mixture of pleasurable and unpleasurable. Is engaging in an activity that interests us always going to guarantee a ‘flow’ experience? I found in my own experience that it isn’t really like that, and often, we need to convince ourselves that even an activity we love is “worth doing”. When I even look at the issue closely, there is nothing in the world that I can say I purely love wholeheartedly. Even if I say I love chocolate, would I want to eat fifty pounds of chocolate in one sitting? So my point is that intrinsic value is always relative. And even when it does work, it can be quite terrible if people have to detach from what they enjoy the most, to do something else. So while it is enjoyable to harmonize with an experience and learn from it, this is often only half the picture of why a person might persevere in something.

The second concern I have is that I don’t believe that any activity humans engage in ever needs to be ‘rejected’ outright, at least from the perspective of a spiritual practice. Competition may be one preferred method to live or learn among people, and it might be important to acknowledge that some people simply thrive on the feeling of competition and ‘winning’. It doesn’t mean that one can then conclude that we all learn best under competition. It might be more like saying: this is one way, and there are plenty of other ways too. These kinds of ways of doing things can be engaged in, but it would need to be under the awareness that they don’t bring about lasting happiness. Even intrinsically motivating activities are not permanent. Hoping that students have more opportunities to learn through a deep enjoyment or flow experience may be too much to ask, especially when students often don’t choose the courses to be in.

The third concern I have is that, in fact, I don’t see how any of these two forms of learning necessarily translates to a genuine concern for others or society. They both focus on ‘motivations’, as though the human being were some kind of contraption with different buttons to press, to make it ‘work’. And they both rely on a certain pleasant, flowing, ‘connecting’ feeling for the two to truly work. But neither people nor life is ever quite like this, and getting people to become absorbed in a subject (such as writing or archery) does not necessarily prepare them for the less controlled situations of daily life. So I think this is where the learning of meditation comes in, because it is here that people might start to get glimpses of something that is not conditioned by time, by rewards, by space or anything else. And this observational awareness could be a tool that sees the whole trajectory of learning: connecting, disconnecting, unlearning, the suffering of learning, even the cessation of learning.

Kohn,Alfie (1999),Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A’s, Praise, and other Bribes. New York: Houghton Mifflin.