Rethinking the Value of Choice: A Cultural Perspective on Intrinsic Motivation
Iyengar, S. S., & Lepper, M. R. (1999). Rethinking the role of choice: A cultural perspective on intrinsic motivation. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 76, 349-366.
Sheena S. Iyengar - Columbia University
Mark R. Lepper - Stanford University
Abstract
Conventional wisdom and decades of psychological research have linked the provision of choice to increased levels of intrinsic motivation, greater persistence, better performance, and higher satisfaction. This investigation examined the relevance and limitations of these findings for cultures in which individuals possess more interdependent models of the self. In two studies, personal choice generally enhanced motivation more for American independent, than for Asian interdependent selves. In addition, European-Americans showed less intrinsic motivation when choices were made for them by others than when they made their own choices, whether the others were authority figures or peers. In contrast, Asian-Americans proved most intrinsically motivated when choices were made for them by trusted authority figures or peers. Theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed.
Rethinking the Value of Choice: A Cultural Perspective on Intrinsic Motivation
Freedom is the right to choose: the right to create for oneself the alternatives of choice. Without the possibility of choice, and the exercise of choice, a man is not a man but a member, an instrument, a thing, (Attributed to Thomas Jefferson, circa 1795).
In America, we cherish individual "choice." "Liberty," after all, is enshrined subordinate only to "life" itself in our Declaration of Independence. Even today, the provision, and the rhetorical appeal of "choice" permeates American life -- from the plethora of options available in our grocery stores, where there is often an entire aisle devoted solely to potato chips or to soft drinks, to the use of the label "pro-choice" by abortion advocates as a persuasive device in current political debate.
Inherent in such practices is the assumption that choice is both desirable and powerful. Psychological theory and research have similarly presumed that choice is invariably beneficial. Repeatedly, across many domains of inquiry, American psychologists have contended that the provision of choice will increase an individual’s sense of personal control (e.g., Rotter, 1966; Taylor, 1989; Taylor & Brown, 1988) and feelings of intrinsic motivation (e.g., deCharms, 1968; Deci, 1981; Deci & Ryan, 1985). Such personal control and intrinsic motivation, in turn, have been correlated with numerous physical and psychological benefits. Indeed, even seemingly trivial (e.g., Langer & Rodin, 1976) or wholly illusory choices have been shown to have powerful motivating consequences (e.g., Brickman, 1987; Dember, Galinsky, & Warm, 1992; Langer, 1975).
Theorists studying intrinsic motivation have provided the clearest demonstration of the link between the provision of choice and human motivation. By far the most prominent current analysis of this concept – that of Deci and his colleagues (e.g., Deci, 1981; Deci & Ryan, 1985), drawing in part on earlier work by deCharms (1968) – virtually equates intrinsic motivation with individual choice and personal "self-determination." In this analysis, people are viewed as actors seeking to exercise and validate a sense of control over their external environments. As a result, they are theorized to enjoy, to prefer, and to persist at activities that provide them with the opportunity to make choices, to control their own outcomes, and to determine their own fate (Condry, 1977; Deci, 1975, 1981; Lepper & Malone, 1987; Malone & Lepper, 1987; Nuttin, 1973; Zuckerman, Porac, Lathin, Smith, & Deci, 1978). Conversely, the absence of choice and control has been hypothesized and shown to produce a variety of detrimental effects on intrinsic motivation, life satisfaction, and health status (e.g., Deci, Speigel, Ryan, Koestner, & Kaufman, 1982; Schultz & Hanusa, 1978; Seligman, 1975).
What, as Jefferson might have said, could be more self-evident? Clearly, different individuals will have different preferences, and certainly, the more choices are available, the more these individuals will be able to find and select alternatives that best match their personal preferences. In addition, the mere exercise of choice itself may have psychological benefits. People offered a choice may feel a sense of autonomy, control, or empowerment.
But are these principles truly as self-evident, and as universal, as they might first appear to investigators raised and living in North America? So ingrained is our assumption that people will find choice intrinsically motivating, that psychologists have rarely paused to examine the more general applicability of these findings.
As an initial examination of the manner in which cultural ideals might affect attitudes towards choice, we conducted a series of small ethnographic studies with Japanese and American students residing and taking classes in Kyoto, Japan. These students were asked to catalogue the choices they made during one normal work day and to rate, from 1 to 5, how important each choice was to them. Even though the American students had typically only resided in Japan for a period of a month -- and presumably were not aware of all the choices available to them -- they nevertheless perceived themselves as having nearly 50% more choices than their Japanese counterparts. In addition, the American students rated their choices as significantly more important than did the Japanese students. Conversely, Japanese and American students were asked to list occasions in which they would wish not to have a choice. Nearly 30% of the American, but none of the Japanese, students said they wished to have choices all of the time and more than half of the American students said that they could not imagine a circumstance in which they would prefer not to have a choice.
A recent, influential cultural analysis, presented by Markus and Kitayama (1991a, 1991b), would seem to shed some light on the mechanisms underlying these differences. Their self-systems theory argues that whereas personal agency is an essential element of the self-constructs of American individualists, it may be much less relevant to the self-constructs of members of more collectivistic cultures, characteristic of Asia and elsewhere. Markus and Kitayama’s analysis suggests that the link between the provision of choice and intrinsic motivation may not be universally applicable.
Indeed, an extrapolation of their analysis might suggest that the demonstrable benefits of choice might be of greatest relevance for North Americans and Western Europeans. Americans, Markus and Kitayama (1991a, 1991b) suggest, possess a model of the self as fundamentally independent. Such individuals strive for independence, desire a sense of autonomy, and seek to express their internal attributes in order to establish their uniqueness within their environments. For Americans, therefore, making a choice provides an opportunity to display one’s preferences, and consequently to express one’s internal attributes, to assert one’s autonomy, and to fulfill the goal of being unique. For Americans, individual choice and personal autonomy may be deeply intertwined with one’s sense of self-identity.
The strength of this link between the expression of choice and the concept of self for many Americans can be easily illustrated with a familiar example. John goes out to dinner with friends. As he peruses the menu, he spots a favorite dish that sounds tempting -- perhaps grilled prawns. To his dismay, however, he listens as the two companions sitting across from him order this same item. Suddenly, he faces a "dilemma of individuality" and must decide whether to go ahead and order the same dish, now that others have already done so. Even if he resists the temptation to change his planned order, he may still find himself obliged to offer some prefatory apology or explanation for his decision: "I hate to be such a copycat..." or "I was really planning on ordering that dish all along."
Now, consider a different cultural context, one in which the participants possess a more interdependent model of the self. In contrast to American individualists, Markus and Kitayama (1991a, 1991b) theorize that members of more interdependent cultures (i.e. most non-Western cultures, and particularly East Asian cultures) strive for interconnectedness and belongingness with their social ingroups, seeking to maintain harmony and endeavoring to fulfill the wishes of those groups (DeVos, 1985; Hsu, 1985; Miller, 1988; Shweder & Bourne, 1984; Triandis, 1990, 1995). For such individuals, the exercise of personal choice may have considerably less intrinsic value. Indeed, in some situations, the exercise of personal choice might even pose a threat to individuals whose personal preferences could prove at variance with those of their reference group. Interdependent selves, therefore, might sometimes actually prefer to submit to choices expressed by others -- if the situation enables them to fulfill the superordinate cultural goal of belongingness.
We all experience the constant interplay between belonging and individuality. The broader dimension is being "a part of" and "apart from" - this plays out in the tensions between spirituality and , revelation and reasoning, intuition and logic, subjective and objective, interdependence and individuality, etc.
Thus in the more interdependent cultures that comprise most of the non-Western world (Hofstede, 1991; Triandis, 1995), the apparent dilemma facing our hypothetical dinner is likely to seem ludicrous. Surely, the discovery of shared preferences should be, if anything, a source of pleasure, an opportunity to display one’s identification with the group. In most Eastern countries, sharing a common menu would be standard procedure when dining out, and it would instead be the assertion of some distinctive individual preference that would require some explanation or apology. If Yuko disliked the shellfish that was being served, her "dilemma of belongingness" would be whether just to pick politely at a dinner she could not eat, or to express her distinctiveness and potentially threaten the harmony of the group around the table.
In particular, for individuals possessing interdependent selves, one might hypothesize that the effects of having one’s choices made by others might depend critically on the specific identity of the other choosers. Depending on the degree of closeness between the chooser and the self, a person making choices for another can be perceived either as a benevolent agent or as an arrogant usurper of an individual’s right to choose for himself or herself.
To examine the relevance of the provision of choice for the intrinsic motivation of individuals from contrasting cultural backgrounds, the present studies examine the responses of Anglo-American versus Asian-American children to three basic conditions. In one condition, children are given a personal choice over some, typically small or incidental, aspect of an activity they have been asked to undertake. In a second condition, this same choice is made for them by someone with whom they have no history of relationship. These two conditions, of course, replicate the basic design of many of the studies that have demonstrated beneficial effects of choice on intrinsic motivation with American or European subjects (e.g., Deci & Ryan, 1985; Zuckerman, et al., 1978).
The third, more distinctive, experimental condition involves an attempt to instantiate, in the laboratory, a second form of "external" control, or lack of personal choice, that is hypothesized to have special relevance for students from interdependent societies. Specifically, someone who is theorized to be regarded by the child as both trustworthy and close in relationship -- a part of the child’s interdependent self -- will exert control over, by making choices for, the student. In Study 1, in this novel, third condition, children will be led to believe that their own mothers had decided their choice of activity; in Study II, in this third condition, children will be led to believe that their classmates had made these decisions.
Our hypotheses were the following: Anglo-American children should show substantially greater intrinsic motivation and other beneficial in the personal choice condition, compared to both the imposed-choice conditions (regardless of who had made the choices for them). Asian-American children, by contrast, should show higher subsequent motivation and other psychological benefits in conditions in which significant others (e.g., their mothers or their classmates) have made choices for them than in traditional no choice conditions, or even in personal choice conditions.
Study I
According to Markus and Kitayama (1991a, 1991b), mothers are theorized to be the closest in relationship to both independent-self and interdependent-self individuals. However, whereas mothers are theorized to be outside the self-system of American independent-selves, mothers are considered to be interconnected with the identity of Asian interdependent-selves. Hence, it seemed of particular theoretical interest to examine children’s responses to contexts in which decisions were made for them by their own mothers.
In Study I, therefore, Anglo-American and Asian-American grade-school children were asked to engage in an anagrams task. Approximately one third of these students were allowed to choose which category of anagrams they would like to try (personal choice condition), one third were assigned that same category by an unfamiliar experimenter (experimenter choice condition), and one third were told that the relevant category had been chosen for them by their mothers (mom choice condition). Participants’ performance on the anagrams task, as well as their subsequent decisions to voluntarily engage in the anagrams task, served as dependent measures.
Methods
Participants
The participants were 52 Asian-American and 53 Anglo-American children enrolled in two schools in San Francisco, California. Both schools were in districts with substantial Asian-American populations. The ethnic distribution of student population within these two schools consisted of roughly 55% Anglo-American, 40% Asian-American, and 5% other ethnic groups. The Asian-American sample included only children who spoke their respective Asian languages of Japanese or Chinese at home with their parents, to increase the likelihood that these Asian-American children were not already totally assimilated into American culture.
Participants were second- (n = 27), third- (n = 36) and fourth-graders (n = 42), ranging from 7 to 9 years of age. There were 35 participants in the personal choice condition (18 girls and 17 boys), 36 participants in the experimenter choice condition (18 girls and 18 boys), and 34 participants in the mom choice condition (15 girls and 19 boys). The study was conducted on school grounds during school hours.
Procedures
Children participated in individual experimental sessions in rooms outfitted with a table and two chairs. On the table were six piles of index cards, with the top card of each pile labeled in bold letters. Each pile included 15 anagrams, ordered from easiest to most difficult, with the labels denoting the category type of the pile. The six categories of anagrams were Family, Animals, San Francisco, Food, Party, and House. Located above the anagrams were six markers of varying colors neatly arranged in a row. On the sides of the table were other word games such as crossword puzzles and "make a word" activities. To minimize participants’ prior experience with these tasks, these activities were created specifically for this study. The words chosen for the anagram tasks were selected from a variety of school books. Efforts were made to ensure that the difficulty across the six categories was equivalent, and indeed, subsequent analyses revealed that the students’ performance did not vary according to the category of anagrams selected.
In a small corner at the other end of the room, out of the child’s line of vision, was a smaller table with a large pile of books and papers. Seated behind this table was a hunched-over, very busy, and disinterested-looking observer who covertly recorded the activity of each student. Prior to the experiment, experimenters and observers were trained to ensure that there would be no differences between the experimental sites. Subsequent analyses revealed that the results did not differ by experimental site.
This study involved two dependent variables. The first assessed each participant’s performance on the anagrams. The second assessed subsequent intrinsic motivation, by examining the amount of time each participant chose to engage in the anagram task during a later free-play period.
A yoked design was employed, in which children were grouped in threes, within ethnicity. The first participant in each triad was in the personal choice condition and had the opportunity to choose the category of anagrams he or she wished to work on. The subsequent two participants were randomly assigned to either the mom choice or the experimenter choice conditions, and both were asked to work on the same category of anagrams that the participant in the personal choice condition had selected earlier. This design is similar to the one used by Zuckerman et al. (1978) and allows participants within the personal choice condition a real choice without compromising the comparability of performance measures across conditions.
Personal choice condition. Upon entering the experimental room, the student was seated at the table and told: "Today we’re going to be doing some word puzzles. Each puzzle contains scrambled letters which you have to unscramble to make a word." The experimenter then reviewed two simple examples of anagrams making sure the student understood the task. The experimenter then pointed to the six piles of anagrams and said: "Here are six piles of word puzzles you can choose from. The categories are Animals, Party, San Francisco, Family, House, and Food. Which one would you like to do? It’s your choice." If students asked the experimenter, "Which one should I do?" the experimenter replied, "It’s your choice. Choose any one you want." Next, the experimenter pointed to the six markers lying above the piles of anagrams and continued, "From these six markers, you can pick any one marker to use for jotting down your answers. Go ahead and choose the one you would like to use." Again, if any student looked questioningly at the experimenter, the experimenter repeated, "It’s your choice, you can choose whichever one you want."