We often assume that giving people the chance to choose what
they are going to do will increase their motivation to do it. One reason why many colleges give their
students so much autonomy is with the belief that if students have selected the
classes they take they will put more effort into those classes than if the
classes were assigned to them.
Of course, when you are actually engaged in a task (like
taking a class), the alternatives you have in front of you are to work on the
task or to do something else entirely and give up on the task. So, perhaps it would be helpful to get people
to explicitly decide that they prefer the task to doing nothing.
This possibility was explored in a paper in the March, 2014
issue of Psychological Science by Rom Schrift and Jeffry Parker.
In one study, they gave participants a choice between one of
two word searchers in which they had to find as many words as possible in a
grid. They would be paid based on the
number of items they found. One search
involved finding actors names, while the other involved finding capitol
cities. A second group got the same two
choices as well as the option not to participate in the task. Nobody chose not to participate. A third group was given a choice of three
puzzles, one of which had unfamiliar terms (famous ballet dancers) that no
participant selected. This last
condition was there to control for the possibility that having three options
rather than two mattered.
The participants given a choice between two or three puzzles
spent about 5 minutes working on the puzzle they selected. Those who were given the option not to
participate spent about 7 minutes working on their selected puzzle. So, explicitly choosing to do something
rather than not to do it greatly increased the amount of time people spent on
the task.
A second study demonstrated that the option to participate
has to be given when people are choosing the task to perform. In this study, some participants were first
told they could opt in to doing a second study as part of an experiment. After opting in (which everyone did), they
selected one of two tasks. A second
group was given a choice between the two tasks or the option not to
participate. Everyone in this group also
agreed to participate. In this study,
the two options (a perception task and a cognition task) were vague enough that
all participants actually performed the same task. Participants who had to choose to do a task
rather than not to do one spent more time on the task and performed better than
those who first opted in and then selected a task.
Finally, a third study found that choosing to perform a task
rather than doing nothing only influenced the particular task selected. In this study, some people chose one of two
tasks to perform, while a second group chose a task, but had the option to do
nothing (which nobody picked). Before
doing the task they selected, they were given a second task in which they had
to find as many differences between a pair of pictures as possible. People spent the same amount of time on this
extraneous task regardless of the choice condition they were in. But, then, participants given the option to
do nothing spent more time on the experimental task than those just given a
choice between two experimental tasks.
Putting all of this together, there seems to be real value
in getting people to commit to doing a particular task by having them choose
explicitly to do that task rather than doing nothing. This advantage reflects that stopping a task
is essentially choosing to do nothing rather than doing the task. Of course, future research must explore
whether the influence of opting against doing nothing has a long-term influence
on motivation. The experimental tasks in
this paper are all short. It is not
clear whether opting to take classes rather than not to take classes would
affect a student’s motivation for an entire semester.
