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Young children would rather explore than get rewards

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Re: Young children would rather explore than get rewards

#61

Post by hrktb »

kqr wrote: post #4

For anyone interested in this type of stuff, I can recommend reading Drive . Briefly, human behaviour can be motivated for extrinsic and intrinsic reasons. The rewards in this article are extrinsic motivators. Exploring is rewarding in an intrinsic way; it is a strive towards autonomy, mastery, and purpose. In adults (and in older children) applying extrinsic motivators kills intrinsic motivation. Once the extrinsic…

Why such a dichotomy between intrinsic and extrinsic when any situation is a mix of both ?

We do our job to get money, but we won't do any job for that sole purpose.

Kids learn chemistry because they are forced to, but they'll find fun bits here and there, they'll ask teachers questions to better understand what they're taught. They won't give a crap about half of the curriculum, but the half they'll remember and will be formative is not guaranteed to be solely from the self-motivated part either.

Going further what motivates us to explore also depends on the environment, what is rewarded and what is not, etc.

I feel splitting things in two theoretical extremes is close to labelling actions good or bad, it's useful if we don't care about nuance, but has little use once we dive below the surface.

> I recommend reading Drive first if you think you disagree.

I remember getting that recommendation for "Getting Things Done" ... is Drive much better as a reading experience ? Is it readable for people who're not into self help books in general ?

Re: Young children would rather explore than get rewards

#64

Post by dzink »

Exploration as the primary algorithm continues as long as we continue to get increasing variable rewards from it. When the rewards tapper off or we are pressured for money, we choose the maximum we've found so far. This instinct to collect options has probably served us well in foraging for food, picking a mate, and any other exploration endeavor that involves finding the best of a range of newly available options.

However it may also be the root of gambling addiction and any other variable rewards game systems. Gambling, lotteries can also become more attractive the more you are pressured for money - one could argue as a means of concentrating on your most approachable local maximum.

Re: Young children would rather explore than get rewards

#65

Post by abdullahkhalids »

brnt wrote: post #17

I guess I must have bever lost the child in me. I've been a fan of open world games, just so I can roam the world. I sometimes dont even play the storyline at all. I still don't like that Steam added 'achievements' that I can't turn off, I'll be in charge of what constitutes a goal thank you very much :) Another poster had an interesting observation about academia vs corporate work. I'm 33 and still in academia, and…

When I first started played Age of Empires 2, I would play against AI and just continue the map for 10s of hours, slowly expanding my influence, but never killing the enemy outright. I would just reshape the map according to my will.

I think a lot of modern games are designed to be like this. Building farms or worlds for fun (I haven't played any of them).

Re: Young children would rather explore than get rewards

#66

Post by acituan »

coddle-hark wrote: post #53
acituan wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> for nearly every kid there is intrinsic motivations you can find I think this can be generalized to all humans. It would be near impossible for a true lack of intrinsic motivation to have made it through evolutionary selection. Like you say, what matters is matching the child's potential with what is available in their current environment, and institutional schooling might be a very blunt tool for that. Not only it…

> It would be near impossible for a true lack of intrinsic motivation to have made it through evolutionary selection. Be careful making assumptions like that. Suicidal tendencies made it through evolutionary selection, after all.

For the case of suicide there is a potential mechanism in which there is a benefit for genes to pass. We can imagine a hardship scenario in which removal of oneself leaves more resources to the remainder of one’s group, which is likely to be their kin and have shared genes. In this case suicide would be adaptive for the genes to pass on. This is nor far fetched because we see other self sacrifice behavior (e.g. between parents and offspring) too.

True lack of motivation both consumes resources and doesn’t contribute to back to the individual or group survival. It is a mode of being that approximates non-living with extra costs. And to be clear I am not talking about a temporary state like depression, or a disease state like chronic depression. I just can’t imagine a permanently stagnant reservoir of genes really passing on without any form of intrinsic motivation. Even at the lowest end of mammalian bioeconomics like sloths, there is motivation, if is just fulfilled it with a different strategy.

Re: Young children would rather explore than get rewards

#67

Post by smhg »

kqr wrote: post #4

For anyone interested in this type of stuff, I can recommend reading Drive . Briefly, human behaviour can be motivated for extrinsic and intrinsic reasons. The rewards in this article are extrinsic motivators. Exploring is rewarding in an intrinsic way; it is a strive towards autonomy, mastery, and purpose. In adults (and in older children) applying extrinsic motivators kills intrinsic motivation. Once the extrinsic…

> The schooling system, with its grades, signed slips, and whatnot, is set up through extrinsic motivation to teach obedience, conformity, and smothering the intrinsic drive so necessary for the creative work we will expect from the children later in life.

I think your expectations of the schooling system are simply skewed. At least in the countries which I lived in (Europe) the 'customer' of the schooling system is first and foremost society as a whole.

The individual, the child, comes second. Not in a way that children are not important. It's just that the outcome of a well organised society is what matters. So, although not in extreme ways of course (there is no evil mastermind), conformity and the likes are important values.

Re: Young children would rather explore than get rewards

#68

Post by rpastuszak »

kqr wrote: post #55
euske wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the major obstacle here is the cost. Since intrinsic motivators vary a lot from person to person, the program has to be customized for individual learners. Unless every kid has an individual tutor or something, this isn't feasible. Most education problems are basically a money problem.

Student-to-student tutoring is super effective. Even if most students suck as tutors (which they probably do – tutoring is difficult), the benefits outweigh the problems by a big margin. Most importantly, it allows each student the desired individual focus. But it also improves the tutors' memories of the classes they used to take. I'm baffled it's not more widely employed in lower education. (Higher education seems…

+100000

> Even if most students suck as tutors [...]

Teaching is such a valuable skill in itself! And, it can be improved. I'd argue that you can't say that you understand something unless you can explain it to someone a step away from your current level of depth in the domain.

Now, imagine every developer spend 5%, 1% of their (coding) time learning how to teach or communicate ideas in a succinct, empathetic way.

We'd not only have less 40yo ranting at some 15yo project, because they used React, but also the quality of our work would improve drastically.

Re: Young children would rather explore than get rewards

#69

Post by robocat »

atoav wrote: post #56
euske wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the major obstacle here is the cost. Since intrinsic motivators vary a lot from person to person, the program has to be customized for individual learners. Unless every kid has an individual tutor or something, this isn't feasible. Most education problems are basically a money problem.

I managed with ~4 kids at once, but it was one of the most exhausting jobs I ever had (which includes street/road work in the summer and carrying stone tiles up houses). Education problems are indeed money problems.

FYI A “street worker” is a prostitute in some English dialects - I am guessing you didn’t mean that!

Re: Young children would rather explore than get rewards

#70

Post by kqr »

hrktb wrote: post #61
kqr wrote: post #4

For anyone interested in this type of stuff, I can recommend reading Drive . Briefly, human behaviour can be motivated for extrinsic and intrinsic reasons. The rewards in this article are extrinsic motivators. Exploring is rewarding in an intrinsic way; it is a strive towards autonomy, mastery, and purpose. In adults (and in older children) applying extrinsic motivators kills intrinsic motivation. Once the extrinsic…

Why such a dichotomy between intrinsic and extrinsic when any situation is a mix of both ? We do our job to get money, but we won't do any job for that sole purpose. Kids learn chemistry because they are forced to, but they'll find fun bits here and there, they'll ask teachers questions to better understand what they're taught. They won't give a crap about half of the curriculum, but the half they'll remember and wil…

Because there is some evidence that extrinsic motivation outcompetes intrinsic motivation. In other words, for some reason, they cannot coexist.

As soon as adults feel extrinsically motivated, they start to view the situation as an economic transaction, where they will only perform tricks for treats. Typical real-world example of this: if you start charging parents (punishment) for coming late to pick up their kids from daycare, parents will become more late. One can speculate that this might be because they start thinking of it as "paying for extra time" rather than "being a nice human being to the daycare staff."

The cases you mention where they do indeed apparently coexist, I suspect (but have no data to support) that the children successfully manage to ignore the extrinsic motivation because the intrinsic drive is so powerful in that instance. It's probably not a sustainable model to rely on that happening, though.

Drive is decidedly not a self-help book. It's a summary of the available evidence in support of and against the existence of intrinsic motivation and how it relates to the other types of motivation (extrinsic and physical and emotional needs.)

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