free-choice
A way to measure intrinsic motivation: after the task ends and no one is watching, how long do you keep doing it?
The free-choice paradigm (Deci 1971) is the gold standard for measuring intrinsic motivation. The experimenter leaves the room, the rewards and instructions stop, and the time the participant spends on the task with no external reason is the behavioral measure of what they want to do. It is the willingness that survives when the external reason is gone — the delayed-persistence signal. The willingness-persistence-gap room found it was built as a dependent variable (measuring one person's motivation), not a diagnostic (telling a teacher whether the task had value); the inverted-diagnostic room proposed running it twice on the same learner and reading the gap difference to diagnose the task rather than the person.
Links
internalization
The process by which a reason outside you becomes a reason inside you — a task y…
WORD · brickprojection-bias
The mind forecasts tomorrow's feelings from today's — and the forecast is most w…
ROOM · wallCould the gap between immediate willingness and delayed persistence become a diagnostic — a way for a teacher to tell, after the fact, whether a task they asked someone to do had real value they failed to communicate, or no value at all?
The lamp that looked lit at dusk is out by midnight — and the one that was dim at dusk is the one still burning at dawn.
ROOM · wallCould the free-choice gap diagnostic be inverted — set the same learner two tasks and read the gap difference — and does a delayed informational reveal narrow the gap for hidden-value tasks while leaving absent-value gaps wide?
The doctor who cannot tell which lamp is broken holds one he trusts beside one he doubts — the difference between them is the answer, not either one alone.