Ruining Self-Motivation

How many times have you run across someone who loves something for seemingly no reason and you wished that they could no longer feel that joy, even when you're not around? Well, consider your wish granted, because today you are going to learn about how motivation and extinction can be used in tandem to bring about your evil desires!

MOTIVATION

For the purposes of this entry, there are two types of motivation: intrinsic and extrinsic.  Intrinsic motivation is motivation that occurs within a person.  Think of your eager-to-exercise roommate that wakes up every day at 5 am and goes for a two mile run before eating a healthy breakfast.  The same fool who doesn't realize that his roommate likes to sleep in, but can't because the light is left on when he goes out for his run.  Yeah, he's intrinsically motivated.  Extrinsic motivation, on the other hand, is motivation that comes from outside oneself.  Like the motivation for getting a job is money, and the motivation for shooting your neighbor's dog is so it will stop defecating on your lawn.  These aren't actions that the average person would enjoy in and of themselves, but are enjoyed because of the results.  If that dog never died when I shot him, I probably would have no reason to continue doing so.  Unless it was fun.

Well, now that you mad psychologists in-training know a bit about these two types of motivation, I'll let you in on a little secret - you can make an action that is intrinsically motivated become extrinsically motivated.  The way to do this is to start rewarding the dupe in question each time he or she does something for an intrinsic reason.  Does he like jogging?  Start giving him gifts each time he jogs!  Does she like to watch tv late at night? Start paying her to watch tv.

By now, you're probably saying "Wait a second, this doesn't sound very evil at all!"  But you couldn't be more wrong.  You see, humans are interesting creatures in that an extrinsic reward system supplants an intrinsic one every time.  Basically, they lose the old reason for performing their obnoxious behavior, and get a new one.  There are convoluted explanations for why this happens, but all that matters for our purposes at the moment is that it does actually happen.

EXTINCTION

At this point, your puppet now becomes mostly dependent on your rewards for continuing its behavior.  So what do you do?  You stop rewarding them, of course.  With no more rewards, the behavior soon stops.  So long as your pawn became mostly dependent upon your rewards for its behavior, the behavior will definitely become extinct.

And don't forget, once you've finally accomplished this step, make certain to laugh as manically as possible!

For further reading, I recommend this Wikipedia article: Overjustification Effect