The truth was, the researcher, Mauricio Delgado, didn’t care if participants guessed right or wrong. Rather, he was interested in understanding which parts of their brains became active as they played an intensely dull game. As they made their guesses, the fMRI was recording the activity inside their skulls. Delgado wanted to identify where the neurological sensations of excitement and anticipation—where motivation—originated. Delgado told participants they could quit whenever they wanted. Yet he knew, from prior experience, that people would make guess after guess, sometimes for hours, as they waited to see if they had guessed wrong or right.
Each participant lay inside the machine and watched the screen intently. They hit buttons and made predictions. Some cheered when they won or moaned when they lost. Delgado, monitoring the activity inside of their heads, saw that people’s striata—that central dispatch—lit up with activity whenever participants played, regardless of the outcome. This kind of striatal activity, Delgado knew, was associated with emotional reactions—in particular, with feelings of expectation and excitement.
As Delgado was finishing one session, a participant asked if he could continue playing on his own, at home.
“I don’t think that’s possible,” Delgado told him, explaining that the game only existed on his computer. Besides, he said, letting the man in on a secret, the experiment was rigged. To make sure the game was consistent from person to person, Delgado had programmed the computer so that everyone won the first round, lost the second, won the third, lost the fourth, and so on, in a predetermined pattern. The outcome had been determined ahead of time. It was like betting on a two-headed quarter.
“That’s okay,” the man replied. “I don’t mind. I just like to play.”
“It was odd,” Delgado told me later. “There’s no reason he should have wanted to continue playing once he knew it was rigged. I mean, where’s the fun in a rigged game? Your choices have no impact. But it took me five minutes to convince him he didn’t want to take the game home.”
For days afterward, Delgado kept thinking about that man. Why had this game interested him so much? For that matter, why had it entertained so many other participants? The experiment’s data had helped Delgado identify which parts of people’s brains became active as they played a guessing game, but the data didn’t explain why they were motivated to play in the first place.
So a few years later, Delgado set up another experiment. A new set of participants was recruited. Like before, there was a guessing game. This time, however, there was a key difference: Half the time, participants were allowed to make their own guesses; the rest of the time, the computer guessed for them.
As people began playing, Delgado watched the activity in their striata. This time, when people were allowed to make their own choices, their brains lit up just like in the previous experiment. They showed the neurological equivalents of anticipation and excitement. But during those rounds when participants didn’t have any control over their guesses, when the computer made a choice for them, people’s striata went essentially silent. It was as if their brains became uninterested in the exercise. There was “robust activity in the caudate nucleus only when subjects” were permitted to guess, Delgado and his colleagues later wrote. “The anticipation of choice itself was associated with increased activity in corticostriatal regions, particularly the ventral striatum, involved in affective and motivational processes.”
What’s more, when Delgado asked participants about their perceptions of the game afterward, they said they enjoyed themselves much more when they were in control of their choices. They cared whether they won or lost. When the computer was in charge, they said, the experiment felt like an assignment. They got bored and wanted it to end.
That didn’t make sense to Delgado. The odds of winning or losing were exactly the same regardless of whether the participant or the computer was in control. Allowing someone to make a guess, rather than waiting for a computer to make a guess for them, shouldn’t have made any real difference in the experience of the game. People’s neurological reactions should have been the same either way. But, somehow, allowing people to make choices transformed the game. Instead of being a chore, the experiment became a challenge. Participants were more motivated to play simply because they believed they were in control.
III.
In recent decades, as the economy has shifted and large companies promising lifelong employment have given way to freelance jobs and migratory careers, understanding motivation has become increasingly important. In 1980, more than 90 percent of the American workforce reported to a boss. Today more than a third of working Americans are freelancers, contractors, or in otherwise transitory positions. The workers who have succeeded in this new economy are those who know how to decide for themselves how to spend their time and allocate their energy. They understand how to set goals, prioritize tasks, and make choices about which projects to pursue. People who know how to self-motivate, according to studies, earn more money than their peers, report higher levels of happiness, and say they are more satisfied with their families, jobs, and lives.
Self-help books and leadership manuals often portray self-motivation as a static feature of our personality or the outcome of a neurological calculus in which we subconsciously compare efforts versus rewards. But scientists say motivation is more complicated than that. Motivation is more like a skill, akin to reading or writing, that can be learned and honed. Scientists have found that people can get better at self-motivation if they practice the right way. The trick, researchers say, is realizing that a prerequisite to motivation is believing we have authority over our actions and surroundings. To motivate ourselves, we must feel like we are in control.
“The need for control is a biological imperative,” a group of Columbia University psychologists wrote in the journal Trends in Cognitive Sciences in 2010. When people believe they are in control, they tend to work harder and push themselves more. They are, on average, more confident and overcome setbacks faster. People who believe they have authority over themselves often live longer than their peers. This instinct for control is so central to how our brains develop that infants, once they learn to feed themselves, will resist adults’ attempts at control even if submission is more likely to get food into their mouths.
One way to prove to ourselves that we are in control is by making decisions. “Each choice—no matter how small—reinforces the perception of control and self-efficacy,” the Columbia researchers wrote. Even if making a decision delivers no benefit, people still want the freedom to choose. “Animals and humans demonstrate a preference for choice over non-choice, even when that choice confers no additional reward,” Delgado noted in a paper published in the journal Psychological Science in 2011.
From these insights, a theory of motivation has emerged: The first step in creating drive is giving people opportunities to make choices that provide them with a sense of autonomy and self-determination. In experiments, people are more motivated to complete difficult tasks when those chores are presented as decisions rather than commands. That’s one of the reasons why your cable company asks all those questions when you sign up for service. If they ask if you prefer a paperless bill to an itemized statement, or the ultra package versus the platinum lineup, or HBO to Showtime, you’re more likely to be motivated to pay the bill each month. As long as we feel a sense of control, we’re more willing to play along.