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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

#181

Post by droopyEyelids »

yellowapple wrote: post #29
adrianN wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I often see criticism of the school system like yours. I think it comes from a perspective of a fairly intelligent, self-motivated individual, probably from a family that valued education. However many children lack one or more of those factors. For them the intrinsic motivation is to play video games all day, or talk to their friends, or smoke weed. There is no intrinsic motivation for most children to learn all the…

> I often see criticism of the school system like yours. I think it comes from a perspective of a fairly intelligent, self-motivated individual, probably from a family that valued education. I ain't vain enough to consider myself even "fairly intelligent", but I can say that I ain't very self-motivated, nor have I been since elementary school, and in hindsight my education system's insistence on strangling such intri…

maybe your vanity is so strong it prevents you from even making a fair judgement of your aptitude relative to the mean

Re: Young children would rather explore than get rewards

#183

Post by GuB-42 »

Aviatore wrote: post #180

If OP's premise is true, I wonder how much that is changing now that parents are throwing electronics at their children. Many of the things that they get to interact with on an electronic aims to optimize rewards. Will this shape generations that are always in search of quick hits and less interested in the exploratory nature of things? How will something that seems to small as a parent reshape the children and socie…

I don't think so. I suspect the "exploration" bias observed in that study is somewhat hardwired into the brain. Kids need to learn, adults need to be efficient.

The test was clearly designed as a way to optimize reward. And indeed, adults quickly went to the optimal solution. But kids kept exploring, even if further tests show that they knew the optimal solution.

Re: Young children would rather explore than get rewards

#184

Post by garyrob »

zornthewise wrote: post #134
yellowapple wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I often see criticism of the school system like yours. I think it comes from a perspective of a fairly intelligent, self-motivated individual, probably from a family that valued education. I ain't vain enough to consider myself even "fairly intelligent", but I can say that I ain't very self-motivated, nor have I been since elementary school, and in hindsight my education system's insistence on strangling such intri…

I am not pursuing a PhD in pure math so I certainly have both interest and ability in doing academic stuff but I found it incredibly hard to get acceptable grades in high school.

I did too. But I've gotten much better at studying/learning over the years, and I attribute my high school problems with grades as a combination of ADD and my head being focused on trying to deal with what, in retrospect, were psychological problems. What I needed back then was a really great therapist and some training in mindfulness meditation. Alas.

Re: Young children would rather explore than get rewards

#185

Post by dpwm »

kqr wrote: post #11
andrei_says_ wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also Alfie Kohn’s Punished by Rewards, a thick tome dedicated to the research and reasons of how and why punishment and rewards don’t teach what’s intended and don’t motivate as intended... and how extrinsic motivation kills intrinsic motivation. Withdrawing rewards is punishment so both are really the same. Human beings are not designed to be trained like rats and birds, regardless of what many believe. If your kid…

Punished by Rewards is in my reading heap but rather far down. Maybe I should prioritise it slightly higher. > Human beings are not designed to be trained like rats and birds, regardless of what many believe. I'd just want to add that according to Drive , training humans like rats and birds work great... If blind obedience, conformity, and minimal quality is something you're looking for -- which many factory line typ…

I'm currently reading Punished by Rewards. So far I would say that Punished by Rewards is broadly consistent with how you describe Drive.

Alfie Kohn acknowledges that where the work is low skill, very dull, requires little collaboration, rewards generally work for as long as the rewards continue.

But employee of the month? Stack ranking? Basically they're just going to destroy any intrinsic motivation, and lead to teams where people are reluctant to collaborate.

Re: Young children would rather explore than get rewards

#186

Post by bart_spoon »

asdff wrote: post #58
adamnemecek wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Academia really doesn't let you explore.

Depends on your advisor.

Academia isn't being a grad student with an advisor. Academia is being the advisor to a grad student (along with research, publishing, probably teaching, etc).

Re: Young children would rather explore than get rewards

#187

Post by ksdale »

adrianN wrote: post #24
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…

I often see criticism of the school system like yours. I think it comes from a perspective of a fairly intelligent, self-motivated individual, probably from a family that valued education. However many children lack one or more of those factors. For them the intrinsic motivation is to play video games all day, or talk to their friends, or smoke weed. There is no intrinsic motivation for most children to learn all the…

It doesn't seem self-evident that forcing kids to learn a little about all subjects has that much benefit. I do taxes for a living and we have a lot of tradespeople as clients, and their life histories are surprisingly frequently - do miserably in school to the point that their self-esteem is destroyed, spend a few years bumming around, drinking too much, playing video games, get a job in the trades, realize they can make more money owning their own business, etc. By the time they come to us, you'd never be able to tell they were the worst students ever.

How many people never make it out of the drinking and playing video games phase because school has convinced them that they're failures?

A lot of kids would be perfectly happy starting some sort of apprenticeship when they were teenagers, and it's not obvious to me that that would be worse than forcing them through the remainder of school.

I think it's hard to tell the difference between kids who have an intrinsic motivation to play video games, and kids who have an intrinsic motivation to do anything but school and have to default to video games because the world doesn't offer much of an avenue for kids to be productive on their own (unless you happen to be very interested in computers and have access to one and the internet).

I say all this as someone who thinks education is profoundly important. I just don't think as much education happens in schools as we'd like to believe, especially for people who don't fit neatly in the system.

Re: Young children would rather explore than get rewards

#188

Post by atoav »

brnt wrote: post #173
atoav wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who in his (mandatory in my country) social year worked with "difficult" kids: for nearly every kid there is intrinsic motivations you can find. Of course that isn't easy and requires much more teachers and a bit more flexibility when it comes to which topics to learn, but good education is making every bodies life better and should be IMO much higher valued both in societal and monetary terms.

How do you find those motivations for children who seem to have none at all?

That's not true. They all have some sort of thing that drives them. For some it might be football, for others it is making up stories, for yet others it is coming up with drawings of weird mad-professor like castles, fashion, a certain genre of music, food, cooking, decorating things you name it.

The one kid that I ever encountered which I didn't find something that I could leverage to get their intrinsic motivation was a very young syrian refugee child who must have been so severeley traumatized he barely remembered my name despite seeing me every day – he was 6 years old. With him it was like working with someone who had dementia, you could only get him for very short periods and do something and he would completely lose it the day after. Most times it seemed like he wasn't there at all mentally.

But for all the others it was just about finding a way to connect certain topics to their field of interest. E.g. xkcd-style calculations for catapult with the "mad professor" as a trojan horse to physics he tended to hate before that, doing record sales calculations with the hiphop guy, writing a text about a soccer game with the soccer guy etc.

Of course sometimes they just wanted to do nothing, but slowly connecting the stuff they were forced to do before with their interests was something that showed tremendous effect. They were gladly coming every day (most because it was worse at home). If someone is stressed they cannot focus unless you make them care and motivate them.

Edit: as you can imagine, this is not the easy route to do that job. The easy route is more authoritarian.

Re: Young children would rather explore than get rewards

#189

Post by brnt »

abdullahkhalids wrote: post #65
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).

I played Age2 in exactly the same way!

Re: Young children would rather explore than get rewards

#190

Post by hrktb »

kqr wrote: post #70
hrktb wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 f…

> In other words, for some reason, they cannot coexist.

I would be interested if you have some pointers. I've tried searching a bit but didn't hit anything.

Intuitively there is a lot of things that I want intrinsically to do, but I will do a calculation wether I'll have external motivations/rewards to do it and decide from there.

For instance I intrincically like programming. It still doesn't mean my intrinsic motivation to program disappeared because I get paid, nor that I won't be exploring thing that I am curious about and try to align external motivation to help me explore them.

> if you start charging parents (punishment) for coming late to pick up their kids from daycare, parents will become more late.

I know this case study, but as a parent I don't see this on a personal level. To put it on a different case, you get fined for parking on priority/handicaped places, but don't see rich people everywhere abusing priority parking. Some do, but most don't, so at least a majority of them don't see it as just an economic transaction. As usual, reality is more complicated.

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