Happy New Year

So don't get mad. I was away for a while but now I'm back. No I was not locked up. It's just I have new inspiration and new fans (!) so I decided to start checking back in periodically following the hiatus.

Following a holiday season and a visit to the family back home in an East Coasterly city (DC), along with a witty short essay from fellow atheist Ricky Gervais, I got to thinking about morality and religion and a basic psychological concept called intrinsic motivation. As compared to extrinsic motivation.

The original is so often better than the copy...

What got me thinking about this is some church goers be doin some really ill mess. And my more agnostic friends to a person are really quite moral. They don't litter, they don't lie cheat and steal, they tip well, and they have a very strong sense of right and wrong and live through that daily. They don't talk about their failings to live up to any standard, they just live up to it and accept the appropriate consequences and guilt when they don't. Unapologetically. I like that style.

Note: I am not implying church goers litter more than non church goers. This essay is conceptual.

Anyway, because I've taken more than a psych class or three I started to mentally marinate on this concept of intrinsic vs extrinsic motivation with respect to moral behavior in observers/believers and non-observant people. Basically - is the threat of eternal damnation combined with the promise of eternal salvation and immortality actually a disincentive for moral behavior? What if the idea of confession, or the concept of a game winning shot on one's death bed...or death row, say...this Christian construct of forgiveness for absolutely anything in exchange for deference and devotion, creates a conscienceless unconscious?

Let's rewind for one sec and review these definitions, courtesy of Wikipedia (to which I donated $5 the other day because if 1% of people who use it do so, it can stay free, you should do it too):

Intrinsic motivation refers to motivation that is driven by an interest or enjoyment in the task itself, and exists within the individual rather than relying on any external pressure.
Extrinsic motivation comes from outside of the individual. Common extrinsic motivations are rewards like money and grades, coercion and threat of punishment. 

Social psychological research has indicated that extrinsic rewards can lead to overjustification and a subsequent reduction in intrinsic motivation. In one study demonstrating this effect, children who expected to be (and were) rewarded with a ribbon and a gold star for drawing pictures spent less time playing with the drawing materials in subsequent observations than children who were assigned to an unexpected reward condition and to children who received no extrinsic reward.

So...these studies about education demonstrate an idea that could possibly be extrapolated to why people act morally or not. If your reward is Heaven and your punishment is Hell for acting or not like you have sense, and you can just keep repenting or testifying or confessing every time you "fall" and it's all good and your reward is back in place...what happens to your intrinsic motivation to behave? Why is this Heaven vs Hell dichotomy even necessary to compel us to act correctly? Why can't we, in the main, just internalize the Golden Rule? Why can't we learn to be empathetic enough to realize that any bad act we commit offends another person...usurps their freedom to live unmolested...would suck if it were done to us? Why is that not enough to keep us all in line? We can burn the outliers at the stake.