"If you ever felt your motivation drain away under a micromanaging boss, he gave you the language for what was happening to you. If you ever sensed that grades and gold stars were somehow diminishing the very learning they were supposed to enhance, he explained why. And in doing so, he helped liberate psychology from one of its most limiting assumptions. The Black Box of Behaviorism For much of the 20th century, the dominant paradigm in psychological research, behaviorism, treated humans as input-output machines."
"There were cracks in this box before Deci. In 1950, Harry Harlow reported that rhesus monkeys learned to solve mechanical puzzles on their own, and introducing food rewards actually decreased spontaneous exploration. In the behaviorist framework, this was unexpected-adding rewards should add motivation. The monkeys, inconveniently, disagreed. But Harlow moved on to attachment experiments, and the idea of intrinsic motivation largely went dormant. Studying Intrinsic Motivation In 1971, Edward Deci published a study that challenged motivation science."
Edward L. Deci’s work identified intrinsic motivation as a central driver of human behavior and showed that external rewards can undermine self-directed engagement. Behaviorism treated inner wants as a "black box" and emphasized rewards and punishments. Harlow's rhesus-monkey research showed that food rewards decreased spontaneous exploration. Deci’s 1971 SOMA-cube experiment found that paid participants spent less free-choice time on puzzles than unpaid peers, indicating monetary rewards dampened intrinsic interest. Positive feedback did not produce the same undermining effect. These findings challenged behaviorist assumptions and shifted research toward the psychological importance of autonomy, intrinsic interest, and internal motives.
Read at Psychology Today
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