Csikszentmihalyi Beyond Boredom and Anxiety [PDF]

Citation preview

BEYOND



Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi



BOREDOM



(I



With contributions by Isabella Csikszentmihalyi Ronald Graef Jean Hamilton Holcomb Judy Hendin John M acAloon



ANXIETY



••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••



••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••



AND



•-I-• ~



Jossey-Bass Publishers San Francisco· Washington· London· 1975



rtf$"



Chapter 1 Enjoyment and Intrinsic Motivation ••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••



In a world supposedly ruled by the pursuit of money, power, prestige, and pleasure, it is surprising to find certain people who sacrifice all those goals for no apparent reason: people who risk their lives climbing rocks, who devote their lives to art, who spend their energies playing chess. By finding out why they are willing to give up material rewards for the elusive experience of performing enjoyable acts, we hope to learn something that will allow us to make everyday life more meaningful. At present, most of the institutions that take up our time-schools, offices, factories-are organized around the assumption that serious work is grim and unpleasant. Because of this assumption, most of our time is spent doing unpleasant things. By studying enjoyment, we might learn how to redress this harmful situation. To be sure, one may see the behavior of people dedicated to the pursuit of enjoyment as useless, the result of deviant 1



2



Beyond Boredom and Anxiety



socialization toward meaningless goals. Psychologists may account for it as sublimated variants of the pursuit of real needs which cannot be directly satisfied. Our interest in the matter relies on a different assumption: if we can learn more about activities which are enjoyable in themselves, we will find clues to a form of motivation that could become an extremely important human resource. The management of behavior, as presently practiced, is based on the tacit belief that people are motivated only by external rewards or by the fear of external punishment. The stick and the carrot are the main tools by which people are made to pull their weight. From the earliest months of life, children are threatened or cajoled into conformity with parental demands; when they go on to school, grades and symbolic promotions are used to make them move along predetermined paths. Even the concepts of identification or internalization are based on the idea that the child is afraid of his parents or envies their status. By the time they grow to be adults, most people have been conditioned to respond predictably to external cues, usually represented by the symbolic rewards of money and status. There is no question that this motivational system, evolved by societies over a long period of centuries, is quite effective. By objectifying incentives into money and status, societies have developed a rational, universal motivational system whereby communities can produce desired behaviors predictably and can allot precisely differentiated rewards to construct a complex social hierarchy. The standardization of external rewards, and the general acceptance of their value by most members of society, has created the "homo economicus" responsive to the laws of supply and demand and the "homo sociologicus" who is kept within bounds by the network of social controls. The commonsense assumption is that extrinsic rewards like money and status are basic human needs-or, in behaviorist terms, primary reinforcers. If this were true, it would be quite hopeless to try substituting satisfaction with one's job for external rewards. But there are good reasons to believe that striving



Enjoyment and Intrinsic Motivation



3



for material goods is in great part a motivation that a person learns as part of his socialization into a culture. Greed for possessions is not a universal trait. Anthropological evidence shows that there are cultures in which material goals do not have the importance we attribute to them (Polanyi, 1957). Even in our society, children have to learn "the value of a dollar"; only because every accomplishment in our culture has a dollar tag to it do children learn to appreciate financial rewards above all else. Other evidence that supports this view is the presence of people, within our society, who choose to expend energy for goals that carry no conventional material rewards. These are the people we deal with in the present study, hoping to learn from them the dynamics of intrinsic motivation. But why should one worry about extrinsic rewards? If they are successful, why try to moderate their effect with recourse to intrinsic motives? The fact is that the ease with which external rewards can be used conceals real dangers. When a teacher discovers that children will work for a grade, he or she may become less concerned with whether the work itself is meaningful or rewarding to students. Employers who take for granted the wisdom of external incentives may come to believe that workers' enjoyment of the task is irrelevant. As a result, children and workers will learn, in time, that what they have to do is worthless in itself and that its only justification is the grade or paycheck they get at the end. This pattern has become so general in our culture that by now it is self-evident: what one must do cannot be enjoyable. So we have learned to make a distinction between "work" and "leisure": the former is what we have to do most of the time against our desire; the latter is what we like to do, although it is useless. We therefore feel bored and frustrated on our jobs, and guilty when we are at leisure. Among the consequences of such a state of affairs is the deep-seated alienation of workers in industrial nations (Keniston, 1960; Ginzberg, 1971; Ford, 1969; Gooding, 1972; TerkeI, 1974). This conflict cannot be dismissed as just a temporary result of affluence. Some writers seem to think that workers are dissatisfied only when their jobs are safe; during periods of scarcity or unemployment, people are glad enough to make a living



4



Beyond Boredom and Anxiety



even if their jobs are dull and meaningless. It is more likely that workers threatened in their jobs will vent their frustration in even more destructive ways. Although German workers during the Great Depression did not agitate for job enrichment, they were glad to take a chance on conquering the world . . There is another serious problem with using extrinsic rewards as the only incentive for reaching desirable goals. Extrinsic rewards are by their nature either scarce or expensive to attain in terms of human energy. Money and the material possessions it can buy require the exploitation of natural resources and labor~If everything we do is done in order to get material rewards, we shall e,xhaust the planet and each other. Admittedly, people will al'ways-n:eed possessions based on resources and physical energy. The waste begins when these are not used only to meet necessities but mainly as symbolic rewards to compensate people for the empty drudgery of life. At that point a vicious circle seems to begin; the more a person complies with extrinsically rewarded roles, the less he enjoys himself, and the more extrinsic rewards he needs. The only way to break the circle is by making the roles themselves more enjoyable; then the need for a quid pro quo is bound to decrease. ~ The same sort of argument holds for the other main class of extrinsic rewards, which indudes power, prestige, and esteem. Although these are in many ways very different from each other, they are all based on an invidious comparison between persons. There is no question that people are different and that some deserve recognition above others in certain respects. But status differentials tend to follow a zero -sum pattern: the psychic benefits to those who get recognition are paid for by the decreased self-respect of those who do not. Therefore, when a social system learns to rely exclusively on extrinsic rewards, it creates alienation among its members, and it places a drain on material resources which eventually may prove fatal. In the past, a more diversified set of incentives apparently reduced the monopoly of material goals; in many societies men seemed to enjoy thoroughly what they had to do to make a living (Arendt, 1958; Carpenter, 1970), or they



Enjoyment and Intrinsic Motivation



5



hoped to be rewarded with eternal bliss, or they found rewards in the approval of their peers (Weber, 1947; Polanyi, 1957). When these other reward systems are operative, demands on the ecology are less pressing. The goal of this study was to begin exploring activities that appear to contain rewards within themselves, that do not rely on scarce material incentives-in other words, activities that are ecologically sound. For this reason, we started to look closely at such things as rock climbing, dance, chess, and basketball. Of course, while these activities may be intrinsically rewarding and hence ecologically beneficial, they are also unproductive. A society could not survive long if people were exclusively involved in playful pursuits. We assumed, however, that there is no unbridgeable gap between "work" and "leisure." Hence, by studying play one might learn how work can be made enjoyable, as in certain cases it clearly is. To make sure that the bridge between the two activities does exist, we included in our study members of a few occupations which one would expect to be enjoyable: composers of music, surgeons, and teachers. By understanding better what makes these leisure activities and satisfying jobs enjoyable, we hoped that we might also learn how to decrease dependence on extrinsic rewards in other areas of life as well. Because modern · psychology is concerned mainly with behavior and performance, rather than the reality of inner states of experience, psychologists largely ignore the distinction between extrinsic and intrinsic motivation. Because the only scientific way to control a person's behavior is to manipulate concrete rewards or punishments from outside the organism, most researchers focus on the motivating effects of extrinsic factors-pellets of food, M&M candies, tokens, or electric shocks. They often seem to forget that behavior appears closely



dependent . Q n . ~)( t cr nzlrcwa-r-d ;-;;·i-mpiy bc caliSc-c xper~tl cOi1ditions have necessitated the use of external rewards. Outside the laboratory people often have quite different reasons for acting. They may, for instance, suddenly find great value or meaning in a previously neutral stimulus simply because it is important for them to create value and meaning. The impor-



6



Beyond Boredom and Anxiety



tance of inner sources of motivation may be obvious enough in real life, but as long as they cannot be harnessed in an experiment they have no chance of being generally recognized. Until that day comes-if it comes-the accepted convention is to believe that people behave or learn only in response to external events. Admittedly, some psychologists-people like Murphy (1958), Rogers (1961), and Maslow (1962, 1965, 1971)-have tried to return the focus of psychological investigation to the psyche, the inner events experienced by a person. But those researchers who are currently working on intrinsic motivation approach the problem from a much more molecular level. They are interested in establishing the reinforcing properties of single stimuli (Day, Berlyne, and Hunt, 1971; Deci, 1973), or they attempt to assess the effects of extrinsic rewards on simple, enjoyable, experiwental tasks (Deci, 1971; Lepper, Greene, and Nis_I,!~!!~_ !~hese approaches generaITy equite enjoyme~ with "pleasure" (Berlyne and Madsen, 1973). But although much behavior is motivated by physiological stimulation which produces a positive response (Olds, 1969; Olds and others, 1972), the simple hedonistic model fails to account for a Wid1 .' range of human action. The crucial question is why patterns 0 ! . stimulation which under some conditions arc neutral or eve . aversive can suddenly become enjoyable. Rock climbing, fo~ instance, is an activity that most people try to avoid and that \ t ven committed climbers sometimes dread-when the choice of limbing is not voluntary, for example. Yet under the right conditions it is an exhilarating experience. To understand how this is possible, it is not enough to know the objective characteristids lof the external stimuli involved, or the pattern of the person'~ ;learned associations to pleasant experiences. What one needs is holistic approach which takes into account a person's goals and abilities and his subjective evaluation of the external situation.'\ It is the complex interaction of these subjective processes that determines whether an experience is enjoyable, as opposed to \~.:ing simply pleasurabl:j-- When it comesto complex activities like the ones studied here, there are very few precedents to draw from. Among the



~



Enjoyment and Intrinsic Motivation



7



most significant work done in this area is the theoretical contribution of Callois (1958), who uses anthropological examples to construct a typology of games and, by implication, a typology of intrinsic motives. The growing literature on play, ably reviewed by Ellis (1973), and studies of games (Avedon and Sutton-Smith, 1971) contain some useful insights into the operation of intrinsic motives. For instance, Kenyon (1968, 1970) has studied attitudes toward physical activity among young people in various cultures; and Sutton-Smith has done much to explain the reasons for play in children (Roberts and SuttonSmith, 1962; Sutton-Smith, 1971a, 1973) and in adults (Sutton-Smith and Roberts, 1963; Sutton-Smith, 1971b). Even these studies, however, are more interested in the social or psychological function of intrinsically rewarding activities rather than in the enjoyable experience itself. As an example, when games involve risk, as in mountain climbing or gambling, the usual explanations given are that the activity is enjoyed because of a masochistic release from guilt about sexuality and aggression (Bergler, 1970). In other words, the usual psychological account of intrinsic enjoyment is based on reductionistic, deficit assumptions: nothing is enjoyable except the simplest physiological needs and the reduction or anxieties generated by them. Here too, there are exceptions, such as Kusyszyn's (1975) refreshing study of the psychology of gambling. On the whole, however, because the discipline of psychology, despite its ultimate roots in philosophy, counts the natural sciences and the medical approach to mental illness among its more immediate ancestors, the study of human behavior is colored by a mechanistic orientation which often fails to do justice to the phenomena it seeks to explain. This intellectual heritage is most obtrusive when psychology deals with the kinds of behavior that are least predictable in terms of species-specific survival needs: creativity, religion, and the enjoyment people derive from complex activities. The leading natural science branch of psychology, behaviorism, explains these phenomena in terms of the same stimulus-response paradigm it uses to account for any other human action. A person paints a picture or plays chess because each step of the process



8



Beyond Boredom and Anxiety



becomes linked to an originally rewarding stimulus; eventually the whole behavior pattern is built up, and painting or chess becomes rewarding in its own right (Skinner, 1953). Psychoanalysis, which in its various forms is the main descendant of the clinical approach to behavior, explains creativity or enjoyment as the disguised manifestation of a conflict between basic instinctual needs and social constraints. People paint pictures because they cannot directly indulge their libidinal curiosity, and they play chess because in that game they can vicariously kill their father (the opponent's king) and thus release the oedipal tension which frustrates them in real life ones, 1931; Fine, 1956). These forms of reductionism are, however, ultimately unsatisfactory. Let us take, for instance, the psychoanalytic account of why people enjoy chess. If chess is pleasurable only because it satisfies libidinal needs, then how can one explain why the game is so difficult, abstract, and elegant? The libido is notoriously uninterested in such qualities. It would be much better pleased if the father were quickly dispatched without all the rigamarole. So one must explain the complexity of the game as a concession to the suspicious superego. In this abstract disguise, the desire to kill goes unrecognized and hence will not produce guilt. But why this particular disguise? A man could express such a libidinal desire in a million forms at least as convincing as chess and much less demanding of energy. It seems more plausible to assume that the main rewards of the game are independent of whatever release its symbolism may bring to the libido. To stay within a Freudian framework, one would suppose that people go to the trouble of playing chess because it appeals to some function of the ego. Sublimation may also be involved, but by itself it is not an adequate explanation. There is nothing wrong with the behaviorist or psychoanalytic accounts, as long as they are understood to be as-If models of the phenomena they deal with. But psychologists and laymen often assume that a likely explanation of a behavior is the only explanation, that the explanatory model exhausts the reality in question. The model then ceases to be as If and becomes nothing but. Chess playing becomes nothing but subli-



Enjoyment and Intrinsic Motivation



a



\



.,'"..,. ..



9



mated oedipal aggression, and mountain climbing is reduced to sublimated penis worship. The problem with such reductionistic explanations is not that they do not work. In fact, they do give a reasonably consistent account of human phenomena; but this account-like all accounts-makes sense only within a particular set of assumptions. Scientific explanations in the natural sciences are always of the as-If kind. They do not presume to stand for the reality explained. They are just models which help to simplify the behavior of the reality under study; they do not claim to represent the wholeness of that reality in the abstract form. If natural scientists, upon discovering gravitational properties, had assumed that the laws of gravity suffice to account for the dynamics of matter, they would have missed other significant forces, such as electromagnetism and atomic energy. Similarly, it seems clear that excessive reliance on the currently paramount reductionistic models will hinder our understanding of things such as creativity or enjoyment. T herefore, we need a new model of intrinsically reward ing behavior-not to substitute it for the reductionistic ones but to complement theI? Scholars who impute death wishes or latent homosexuality to rock climbers may be perfectly correct in their ontogenetic analysis. But such an analysis fails to address the most intriguing question: Why is climbing enjoyable? We shall not be concerned with questions of origin, of psychic compensation, of phylogenetic function. Very POSSiblY~ as ethologists have suggested (Beach, 1945; Jewell and Loizos, 1966; Eibl-Eibesfeldt, 1970; Bekoff, 1972, 1974; Fagen, 1974), playful activities enable the species to develop flexible behavior which is adaptive in the long run. But that is not what we are interested in demonstrating. The simple goal of this study is to understand enjoyment, here and~w-not as compensation for past aeslres, not as preparaiiOi1-fOrfuluren eeas,l-)ut as an ongoing processw!U