When my son Jack was 9 months old, he had a favorite toy: The Exersaucer. This toy (pictured below with Jack, sans a full head of hair) had it all. It was like the Cadillac of toys for tots. Kids who couldn’t stand on their own were suspended in air and could rotate around to play with several different toys that stimulated their senses. The Exersaucer had a concave base so it could sway back and forth a bit, but would not tip over.
Once Jack learned how to crawl, one of his favorite pastimes became crawling into the bowl-shaped base. He would hide there and scream for joy (he hadn’t yet realized that screaming rendered the hiding ineffective). One day, my friend Tom was over and Jack scurried onto the Exersaucer base. He played for a couple minutes, but then began to cry. Tom was raised in an authoritarian household where whining was not allowed, so it caught me off guard when he asked me why I didn’t help Jack out of the ExerSaucer. In Tom’s eyes, Jack was stuck, and unable to escape. As Jack screamed louder and louder, Tom looked at me quizzically, as if to say, “How can you let Jack suffer like that?”
Now, as parents, we develop a pretty good sense of when our kids are in trouble and when they may be whining a bit. In fact, most parents comment that their children have different screams: the “HELP! I’m in trouble!” scream and the “I don’t like this – fix it for me” scream/whine. Jack’s whining in the Exersaucer struck me as more of the latter. After letting him struggle for a couple minutes, Tom asked me if I was I willing to concede that Jack was truly unable to escape the Exersaucer.
I went into the kitchen and brought back a jar of Planters Peanuts. Jack loved shaking the jar, looking at the peanuts, and rolling the jar across the living room carpet. I showed Jack the peanuts and he squealed with delight. I then set them about five feet away from the Exersaucer. With no hesitation or trouble, Jack scurried out of the Exersaucer. He had successfully freed himself from the Alcatraz-esque ExerSaucer and was now playing with the Planter’s Peanuts.
Although I had never tried this experiment with Jack before that day, I had a hunch it would work because I believed that he could crawl out of the Exersaucer, but that he simply was not sufficiently motivated to do so. Essentially, Tom and I were observing a difference between what Jack had learned and what he was motivated to do.
Latent learning
This phenomenon, latent learning, occurs when an organism has learned a behavior, but is not motivated to engage in the behavior. Tolman and Honzik (1930) conducted a classic study of latent learning that involved rats navigating a maze. Half of the rats were rewarded with food when they reached the end of the maze and the other half of rats were not rewarded. After 10 days, the researchers continued rewarding (or not) some of the rats, whereas for other rats, the researchers changed the incentive (either adding a reward or making it unavailable). Thus, the four groups of rats were as follows:
Group 1 – rewarded for all 22 trials of the study
Group 2 – not rewarded at all
Group 3 – not rewarded for trials 1-10, but rewarded on trials 11-22
Group 4 – rewarded on trials 1-10, but not rewarded on trials 11-22
Not surprisingly, Group 1 made fewer errors running the maze than Group 2 due to the availability of the reward. Group 3 was the key condition, because Tolman and Honzik (1930) were able to monitor how quickly Group 3’s performance improved, and whether they had been learning in the absence of a reward. Almost immediately after receiving food, Group 3’s errors dropped to the level of Group 1. It appeared that the rats did know how to navigate their way through the maze all along, yet just like Jack in the Exersaucer, they weren’t sufficiently motivated to do so until a reward was present.
Interestingly, Group 4’s errors increased quickly when the possibility of a reward was removed, again illustrating the motivational power of rewards. Below is a graph that depicts Tolman and Honzik’s results.
Latent learning in sports
Two years ago, our basketball team was coming off back-to-back conference championships and national tournament appearances. We had been consistently good for several years, but we were graduating five of our top six players, including multiple All-Americans. For several years, we had played 6-7 players the majority of the minutes during games. Typically, this resulted in those 6-7 players developing tremendous chemistry. The starters tended to play 35 minutes (out of 40) per game, regardless of how fatigued they may have been. By the end of the season, they were tired, and the other seven players were less enthused by practice because they felt they had little chance of earning more playing time. Thus, it was difficult to get players to exert the energy during late-season practices that we needed to continue improving throughout the season. That summer, we brought in a consultant to facilitate a series of coaches’ meetings to evaluate our program. One theme that came up consistently in our meetings was that in order to play harder in games, practice harder, and improve over the course of the season, we would have to play more players. This meant playing younger players who were not yet at the same level as veterans and trusting that over time, the team would reap the benefits.
This would be a major change for us, but we surprised a lot of people by going 23-5 the first year with a roster of relatively inexperienced players. Last season, we went 30-1, and were ranked #1 in the nation in Division III for six consecutive weeks. Much of our success the past two seasons was due to having talented and unselfish players who worked exceptionally hard. We went from all five starters typically playing 30+ minutes per game to last year when our All-American guard averaged less than 28 minutes per game, thirteen players playing in most games, and ten of those players averaging more than 10 minutes per game.
With this change in how many players saw the floor over the past two years, what struck me the most is how little effort we had to invest coaching players to work hard in practice. Rather than exhorting players to exert themselves during practice, they competed each day in practice like it was a game. They weren’t afraid of wearing themselves out for games, and the opportunity for 13 or more players to play in each game appeared to be a sufficient motivator for each player to bust his butt every day in practice. As coaches, we regularly commented on how enjoyable practices were because of the players’ effort, energy, and enthusiasm. Each player was motivated by multiple factors, including the opportunity to play, the team’s success, and the goal of winning a national championship (sadly, we came up one game short of the Final four, losing to the eventual National Champions).
All organisms are pulled by desirable outcomes. We observed this with my son Jack, with Tolman’s rats, and with our basketball players at the University of St. Thomas. What is desirable to one may not be desirable to another (e.g., another child may be disinterested by peanuts, but motivated by the jingling of car keys). One of the keys to understanding what motivates a person is the identification of that individual’s goal. Each of us has different goals, and thus each of us responds differently depending on the reward or incentive. For some, the incentive of feeling good is powerful, for others it is money, for others it is feeling a connection to others. This is what makes the study of motivation both fascinating and complex.
Whether it’s Planters Peanuts, pellets of food, or playing time, we all have unique pressure points that drive our behavior. Until next time, may you find your own and others’ motivational hot buttons as you strive for excellence!
References
Tolman, E.C., & Honzik, C.H. (1930). Introduction and removal of reward and maze performance in rats. University of California Publications in Psychology, 4, 257-275.
