Going through the motions, or, if it's all peaks it's really a plateau

[oursin]

Further thoughts loosely connected with the 'intrinsic'/'extrinsic' post yesterday, and stuff coming up all over the reading list.

That even people who are doing things as ends in themselves, because they're an intrinsic form of satisfaction (rather than accruing social approval or external rewards) are going to have times when these things give

Comments

[parthenia14]

I think I looked at Allport's stuff as it related to work motivations, and basically the minute you start to look at the dichotomy in any detailed way it starts to fall apart. It's the sort of thing that looks good on a chart, but just because you can think about motivation as instrinsic or extrinsic, it doesn't mean that the real world works like that. 'Intrinsic' is always privileged above 'extrinsic'. I am intrinsically motivated; you are just here because you think it'll make you look good...

[oursin]

There are so many of these ways of dividing up things that would work so much better conceived as a scale or a spectrum than as a dichotomy (cf the Kinsey scale).