Motivation

Hey Nick, Vanessa, Jason and Erin,

Thanks for the great read and interesting ideas! I have to say that reading your papers is really helping me think of my own in a more structured way. I will try and be as brief as possible.

Nick

– In advance, let me apologize if I misconstrue your argument. There were a lot of ideas in your paper and I may not have gotten everything straight.

– I agree with Steven and Erin that cleaning up your definition of fun would be helpful. Instinctively, I don’t agree with defining fun as “restlessness in the midst of prosperity.” I haven’t read Tocqueville but the “cycle of acquisition and divestment” that you describe seems decidedly un-fun-like, at least when done for its own sake. I’m not sure consumerism is necessarily fun, for example, maybe it’s a pursuit of fun?

– It may appear in your draft, but I think our readings on what drives intrinsic motivation – autonomy, competence, and relatedness – may help inform your theory of fun

– I don’t have any other legal examples for you and I think the ones you have a really great. Although I know you are trying to focus on legal interventions, you may want to look at the corporate world to see how they try to make work fun.

Vanessa

– I am very intrigued by the idea of a patriarchal public goods problem although I’m not sure whether I agree with the idea of precarious manhood. Not because that section isn’t thorough and convincing, I just have a prior commitment to an opposing belief. Namely, that I think a lot of female behavior may be driven by concerns of losing one’s femininity. The difference may be that a woman may have less control over whether people see her as feminine or not, where as your paper suggests, men do have control over how masculine they are thought of.

– My basic issue with the public goods problem is that it is not so clear to me that policing other men’s behavior is really an altruistic act. This circles back to an idea we have been discussing all semester as to how remote does the benefit of a particular, costly action have to be in order to describe that action as altruistic. In the case of the “gender police” I would think the benefit is pretty immediate because putting down homosexuals or women promotes you as a man directly and only reinforces ideas of masculinity remotely.

Jason

– I know very little about voter turn-out, so your paper was very interesting. Like the other posters, I was intrigued by your description of independent voters. Is a better description of an independent voter a “likely non-voter”?

– I’m not sure that the corporate donations analogy to publicizing gifts holds because, in many cases, the purpose of donating is for people to know you have donated. Your paper argues that people vote primarily as a sense of civic duty or altruism (rather than the idea that they want a government who cares only about their interests), as such, I’m not sure people would be so interested in broadcasting the fact they voted. It would seem somewhat self-serving, especially if it’s an opt-in process rather than an opt-out. But that’s just my instinctual reaction.

– If you are looking for other interventions or more information to fine-tune your interventions (not that any is needed, I think you have a good variety of options), the strategies political campaigns employ to increase or suppress voter turn-out may be an interesting lead. Perhaps another way to improve voter turn-out is to encourage more parties and force some diversity in viewpoints between the parties in order to make it more difficult for people to sit on the fence

Erin

– Thank you for the great overview of prison ideologies. I’m not sure whether it would be outside the scope of your paper, but I wonder how prisoners currently meet the psychological needs in Deci and Ryn’s framework. It would seem that the challenge prisons face is not instilling a sense of self-determination in prisoners, but aligning the methods in which they get a sense of competence, autonomy and relatedness with the values of society.

– You address the fact that society may consider prisoners as non-contributors. I wonder if the separation may even be stronger than that and society considers prisoners as not even members of a common community – as shown by their length of incarceration. Perhaps an ideology that helps make society more inclusive would facilitate reforms.