When a magician pulls a rabbit out of a hat, or knows exactly which card you secretly plucked from a deck, how curious are you to know how she managed the trick? For many people, the answer is "very."
Some people are even willing to risk a mild electric shock to find out, as psychologist Kou Murayama, PhD, and his colleagues learned in a recent experiment. Using fMRI scans, the team found that people who showed more activity in the striatum—part of the brain's reward network—were more likely to risk the electric shock to find out how the magic trick worked.
In some ways, that's not a surprise. Humans have long understood the powerful pull of curiosity—in proverb and myth, curiosity kills the cat and curious Pandora unleashes evil into the world. But "intrinsic motivation"—which includes curiosity, as well as the desire to learn and to try challenging new things—is understudied in psychology, says Murayama, who heads the Motivation Science Lab at the University of Reading in the United Kingdom.
Now he and his students are working to change that, by using fMRI, behavioral experiments, longitudinal studies and computational modeling to explore such questions as how curiosity drives behavior, what it looks like in the brain and how it interacts with extrinsic motivators, such as money or other tangible rewards.
The hope is that such basic knowledge might someday lead to interventions to increase intrinsic motivation in schools, workplaces and other settings, Murayama says. But to understand how to increase motivation, he says, "we need to first understand what it is and what the mechanisms are."
A yearning to know
Murayama's lab is relatively young. He earned his PhD from the University of Tokyo in 2006 and joined the faculty at the University of Reading only four years ago, after a series of postdocs. But the lab is in expansion mode, and his work is gaining notice.
In 2016, he won APA's $25,000 F.J. McGuigan Early Career Investigator Research Grant on Understanding the Human Mind. This year, he earned his first two major research grants as the sole principal investigator, totaling £1.3 million ($1.7 million), from the Leverhulme Trust, a U.K. research charity foundation. The grants will allow him to nearly triple the size of his team.
Together, Murayama and his students are weaving diverse lines of study into the lab's research program. One focus is using behavioral and neuroimaging experiments to explore intrinsic and extrinsic motivation and how the two kinds of motivation can interact with each other.
For example, postdoc Johnny Lau, PhD, is working with Murayama on the magic trick study. In it, participants in an fMRI scanner view either a picture of a tempting food (a tangible external motivator), or a short video of a magic trick performed by a professional magician. Then the researchers show the participants a "wheel of fortune" that can be spun for the chance to win the food or an explanation of the trick. However, participants are told that if they lose, they will get a mild electric shock. In preliminary results, Lau and Murayama have found that food and curiosity excite the same reward areas of participants' brains, in the striatum. And, in both cases, people who showed more activity in those reward areas were more likely to choose to risk the electric shock.
"If you're familiar with the story of Pandora's box, that's what this is," Lau says. "It's about the seductive power of curiosity."
Murayama has also found that people are not very good at estimating or understanding what will motivate them (what he calls "metamotivational capacity")—they underestimate intrinsic motivation and overestimate the sway of external rewards. Classic research from the 1960s and 1970s on the "undermining effectopens in new window" found that extrinsic rewards are often not, in fact, effective motivators and that offering rewards can even undermine people's intrinsic motivation to do a task. But Murayama's results suggest that laypeople don't understand this.
In one study, for example, Murayama asked participants how much they believed that they would enjoy a seemingly boring task (e.g., putting words in alphabetical order), and then asked them to rate their actual enjoyment afterward. He found that people underestimated how much they would enjoy the dull work.
"They found a way to make it more interesting," Murayama says. "People have a good capacity to create enjoyment out of even a boring task."
However, when the researchers then introduced an external motivator—offering people cash to complete the task—participants overestimated how much more they would enjoy it.
"They thought that because they were getting money, they should enjoy it," Murayama says. "But the actual enjoyment was not that high."
In another line of research, Murayama and graduate student Greta Fastrich are studying what inspires people to attempt difficult tasks. "Why do people go mountaineering?" Murayama asks. "People want to climb challenging mountains, even though it is difficult and they run the risk of losing their life. When we look into the [psychology] literature, there are not many studies that attempt to explain why."
To try to begin to answer the question, Murayama and Fastrich are asking people to answer vocabulary questions. Participants can choose the level of difficulty of the vocabulary words. In preliminary results, Fastrich has found that when participants are offered cash rewards for correct answers, the participants, not surprisingly, prefer easier questions. But when no cash is offered, participants prefer the challenge of more difficult questions. Next, Fastrich plans to do the experiment again, this time combining computational modeling and fMRI scans to investigate the underlying neural correlates of challenge-seeking behavior.
In another line of research at the lab, graduate student Laura Burgess is working on a longitudinal study designed to measure "motivation contagion," or whether students can become inspired by spending time with more motivated peers. "If you see a friend who likes mathematics, do you start to like mathematics more, too?" Murayama asks. To find out, the researchers (in collaboration with the charity organization BrainCanDo) aim to recruit about 100 girls from a local boarding school and will follow them for one school year. The researchers will gather behavioral and fMRI measures of the girls' intrinsic motivation to learn, then follow them and their friendship networks to see if girls who spend more time together become more alike in their levels of motivation and brain functioning.
One question, many methods
Murayama's students say his interest in multidisciplinary research methods—including neuroimaging, behavioral experiments, longitudinal studies, computational modeling and analyzing large-scale data sets—allows them the freedom to expand their own knowledge. "One of the reasons I really appreciate working with Kou is that his knowledge allows me to use and learn different techniques," Fastrich says.
Such diverse studies can be challenging to organize, Burgess says. For the motivation contagion study, for example, she will administer multiple rounds of questionnaires to more than 100 students, plus schedule time for fMRI scans for all of them.
"Luckily, the support I get here is amazing," she says. "Kou has always got time to meet, even if he doesn't really."
For his part, Murayama hopes that examining the question of motivation from many angles will lead to a better understanding of how different types of motivation drive human behavior. But he knows it is a long-term project. "It's a big question: What is motivation?" he says. "I don't think I can answer it in the next 20 or 30 years."
Research foci
The Motivation Science Lab is exploring:
1: What is curiosity; what drives people to learn and try new things?
2: How do "intrinsic" and "extrinsic" motivation interact to influence behavior?
3: How well do people understand what motivates them?
4: Can students become more motivated by spending time with motivated peers?
"Lab Work" illuminates the work psychologists are doing in research labs. To read previous installments, go to www.apa.org/monitor/digital and search for "Lab Work."
