Book Report

 Book Report:  Why we do What We Do

Why we do What We Do

Book Overview: The book I chose for the report is called why we do What We Do written by Edward Deci.  The book primarily focuses on how people can become engaged and successful in pursuing their goals at work, in school or in relationships. In the book, Deci developed a general research design named experimental paradigm for exploring the question of how rewards affect intrinsic motivation. The results demonstrated that when people are encouraged to pursue a task for its own sake, they perform better than those told to do it for a reward. A scientific example in the book is when monetary rewards were involved in the experiment because it demonstrated how quickly students that dependent on rewards shifted their view of the activity from a satisfying activity in its own right to an activity that is used for obtaining rewards, thus losing the excitement they once had for the activity. Throughout the book Deci uses college students as examples and using rewards and punishments to direct people’s motivation. People’s intentions are usually upon rewards, to communicated by the style and location they exhibit when dispensing rewards.

The book relates to the powerpoint slides involving self-control. It discusses about

explains does well to deconstruct many counterproductive things almost all of us do achieve our goals and use scientific findings to show what works and what doesn’t.

Deci experiments has caught my attention, in which I could relate from my point of view on my work place. My job is a passion I enjoy doing not because of money but it’s something that time goes by so quickly and the reward of keeping my community safe it a great feeling. This relates to one of Deci experiments, mentioning two groups. Group A were assigned to do a specific puzzle and group B was given an option of choosing their puzzle and could spend as much time. The results shown was group B had an amazing outcome on time due to the fact they choose the puzzle they liked. In which I’m an officer and spend more time at work then home due to the passion that I have on my career.

The behaviorist’s answer is any lack of motivation could be attributed to inadequate reward contingencies. For example, people begin to see the activities merely as instruments for attainment of monetary rewards, so they lose the excitement and vitality they once had for the activities.When people say that money motivates, what they really mean is that money controls.People perform less well at problem solving when they are working for an extrinsic reward than when they are intrinsically motivated.