Concept
Self-Perception Theory
self-perception motivation identity
Developed by psychologist Daryl Bem: people infer their own internal states (emotions, preferences, motivations) the same indirect way they infer other people's — by observing behaviour and drawing a conclusion from it, rather than through privileged internal access. Just as we infer someone is happy because they're smiling, Bem argued we infer our own happiness partly by noticing that we're smiling — meaning deliberately changing a behaviour (forcing a smile) can genuinely shift the inferred internal state.
Applied to payment and enjoyment. Richard Wiseman used self-perception theory to explain a BBC field experiment: participants asked to pick up litter in a park were paid either £10 or £2 for the task, then asked how much they'd enjoyed it. Wiseman's prediction, from Bem's theory, was that a person paid handsomely would look at that fact and reason "I was paid a lot, so I must not have enjoyed it" — while a person paid a token amount would have no such external justification to point to and would infer they'd actually enjoyed the task (see Wiseman Litter Payment Self-Perception Study). See Overjustification Effect (Extrinsic Reward Undermining Motivation) for the closely related mechanism by which an external reward crowds out an inferred intrinsic motivation.
Discussed in
- Episode 288 — 288-what-the-world-s-best-chat-up-line-reveals-about-human-psychology