#43: Three Things that got me thinking

✏️Pénélope Bagieu + 🎬Free Guy + 👮‍♀️fairness & authority

Happy Tuesday folks.

Below are Three Things that made me think about intrinsic motivation in the past week.

Also, did you catch last week’s guest post by Sarah Miller, who writes the newsletter Can we read? She shared a lovely selection of children’s books that tell stories of intrinsic motivation. We’ve just started reading #6 at home:

#41: Stories of intrinsic motivation for all ages

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1. Process vs. result

Last week, I shared a quote by Tove Jansson from Pénélope Bagieu’s graphic book Brazen. I’ve since enjoyed (re-)listening to a few interviews with Bagieu, who is consistently smart and funny. This quote¹ on (perceived) failure, from a 2021 interview on French public radio France Inter, resonates with our theme:

[Failure] pushed me to ask myself what was really important. Was it the result, and its being validated? Or was it the creative process, which makes me happy? Doing things makes me very happy, and the end result, less so.

So even if someone says in the end: “It’s not so great, what you’ve done,” I say: “Yes, but I spent four amazing hours drawing it.” That is the right calculation. Because then it doesn’t matter so much if we’re not successful later on.

penelopeb

A post shared by Penelope Bagieu (@penelopeb)

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2. Going off-script

Free Guy has all the bazookas, car chases, funny zingers and cameos, plus tender love scenes that you’d expect from a video-game / action / romantic / sci-fi-ish blockbuster comedy.

It also happens to be a wholesome reflection on motivation: how a person—or a video game character—literally going off-script to pursue his own goals (does pursuing a girl count as “own goals”? It does here) lifts up his life and in turn, that of others around him.

As Guy says:

Life doesn't have to be something that just happens to us.

I won’t sum up the plot here; writing it down will make it sound more convoluted than it actually is. (I watched it in several chunks while folding laundry and eating pizza, and can vouch for the script’s clever digestibility.)

Plus, the spectacular Jodie Comer shares the screen with Ryan Reynolds, and in my book that’s reason enough to watch the movie.

freeguymovie

A post shared by Free Guy (@freeguymovie)

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3. Fair and square

We are more likely to consider people in positions of authority as legitimate—and to comply with them—if we perceive that these authorities behave fairly, says a study published last month in the journal Science Advances.

That sounded obvious to me at first read. But it is, according to this Yale press release published last week, the first experimental evidence that “visible efforts by authorities to treat people fairly, regardless of whether they result in punishment—or even when an enforcement decisions is based on a mistake—make people intrinsically more motivated to cooperate and comply with the law.”

Imagine a scrupulous, courteous police officer, suggest the study authors. If there’s less crime in her beat than in neighbouring areas, is that because people perceive her as fair, or because she’s good at spotting and punishing wrongdoers? Are citizens intrinsically motivated to follow the law, or rather extrinsically motivated to avoid fines or arrests?

The researchers didn’t study real-life police encounters; instead, they observed 90 university students, split up in groups of five to play games² with tokens via networked computers. In each group, four students were randomly assigned to play “citizens” and the fifth person played the “authority” role. The study found that the authority’s “mere attempt to implement a fairer procedure increases the probability that a citizen contributes to the public good.”

Why does this matter? Well, (shocker!) arresting lots of lawbreakers is not enough, and fairness matters. Yale political scientist Gregory Huber, who co-authored the study, says:

Our results help us understand why certain reforms, for example abolishing racial profiling, might improve compliance with the law even if they are, on face, inefficient. When law enforcement is perceived as biased or unfair, this alone can diminish our willingness to cooperate.

Also, the paper focusses on relevance for the police’s legitimacy, and I wonder if the findings could also apply to certain workplaces, or tax enforcement—or any other setting with a marked imbalance of power?

Photo by King's Church International on Unsplash

1. Voici la réponse en V.O. pour les francophones (la question de la journaliste Eva Bester commence vers 3 minutes 20):

“Ça m’a poussée à me demander ce qui était vraiment important : Est-ce que c’était le résultat, et le fait qu’on le valide, ou est-ce que c’était le processus créatif, qui moi me rend heureuse ? C’est-à-dire : être en train de faire les choses me rend très heureuse, et finalement le résultat, moins.

Donc même si on me dit au final : ‘C’est pas dingue, ce que t’as fait,’ je dis: ‘Oui, mais moi j’ai passé quatre heures géniales à le dessiner.’ Donc en fait c’est ça, le bon calcul. Ça fait que, du coup, c’est moins grave de ne pas forcément rencontrer le succès après.”

2. More details about the games in the paper.