MC: Yeah, yeah.-- it is also interesting that you know, we found this study of workers that workers think that -- we studied the whole gamut from professionals to assembly line workers and clerical workers, in between and so -- and we studied them with this method that I kind of invented in the seventies; which we still use and it is very much fun, which means that a person -- originally we had the person wear a pager, just a simple beeper that you could signal, by sending a radio signal to it. And we had people wear pagers and then seven times a day we would send the signal, within a two hour period at random moments and they did not know when it would come or when the signal would come. But whenever the signal came they had to take out a little booklet we gave them and then write down where they were, what they were doing, and then who it was that they were with, and then a number of dimensions -- like how happy to sad they felt; how cheerful, irritable; along that line or how friendly or hostile they felt or so forth; how much they were concentrating, etcetera, etcetera. So when you do that, you do it about seven times a day, at the end of the week you have about fifty responses and then you can compare how they feel for instance at work and how they feel outside of work, at home, or in public whenever they are.
And what we found is then actually people report more flow from work than from any other place except if they had a strong hobby or interest. Then when they were doing that thing, which was quite rare usually, but you know if you like to go bowling it would be maybe once a week, and then you felt kind of in flow. But otherwise work tended to be more flow-like than at home. And if you think about it, it makes a lot of sense; in other words, that at work you have challenges which are clear, more or less clear, you get feedback from how you are doing and you can concentrate on what you are doing and at home you are much more vulnerable to distractions and it is not clear what you have to do, often, and -- especially if you are the man of the house whereas the housewife feels in control at home and so the difference is not as big for women. But even women feel usually more in flow at work because there they can forget all of the -- see you are open -- at home you are always open to things that go wrong in ways that indirect; at work it is kind of mediated by all kinds of usually I mean, unless you are actually getting fired or the company is going bust, you don't feel the kind of personal threats that you can feel at home when the kids are not at home on time or when you havn't paid the light bill, or when you get into a fight with your spouse and you don't know what the outcome will be. And it is much more close to the bone, what happens at home, especially for women. Women love to work because they say at work, what I do doesn't matter that much; at home what I do is with the family , it is to dangerous to just relax and do it and forget everything. You have to be always knowing what you are doing, at work it does not matter.
Rob: Is that the case for factory workers and for professional women?
MC: More for -- yeah. It is more case for the lower. For professional women there was ,interesting ,that they differentiated. Some of them were more committed to work than most men were and others were more like the factory working women, that is they took their work as a good kind of interesting interlude, but it is not real life and so forth. And that is what the count of the matter.
Rob: Okay so I want to just do a quick station ID. I am interviewing Mihaly Csikszentmihaly, who is the discoverer and chronicler of flow. The author of the book Flow and he is one of the pioneers and founders of positive psychology. We have been talking about his research, just now talking about how he looked at workers-- people at work and at home on how he did his studies.
I wanted to get one more word that concept out that we have not really used and that is intrinsic reward. Can you -- because you are already referring to the idea, but talk about intrinsic reward and how that fits into what you are talking about please.
MC: Yeah, well the fact is that most of the things we do in life are not done because we like to do them but because either we have to do them or we want something at the end that justifies doing it.
This was actually when I did my dissertation on artists this was the place where I began to question the kind of wisdom of psychology at the time, which was that you did things for some goal outside -- A rat will run down a maze to get to the cheese and that model was applied to human behavior that you do things to get to the cheese at the end, right? Whereas artists, I found would get incredibly involved in doing a painting let us say, and spend weeks and weeks perfecting it and changing it in small ways and not going to the bathroom unless really necessary, and not eating and so forth. Then they finish the painting and they look at it for maybe five minutes and they put it against the wall and often never look at it again.
And many of them -- those who are successful will have a gallery owner who would come every once in a while and try to look at the things against the wall and take them away and if they sold a painting, give the painter some money. But he would not be interested in the thing at all after he finished it. So I said "why is -- this does not fit the model of psychology that is based on rats running after the cheese. This looks like people -- actually these artists are doing the painting because they enjoy the painting itself."
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