Are humans naturally lazy or naturally curious and creative?

 

There is a claim about human nature that gets repeated so often it stops sounding like a claim at all: left to themselves, people do as little as they can. Douglas McGregor put it at the top of the assumptions he saw running conventional management, in the form "the average human being has an inherent dislike of work and will avoid it if he can." He did not believe it. He thought it was a self-fulfilling belief that organisations impose and then discover.

But notice that this is an assertion about our nature, not about our economy. So it should be tested where nature is least filtered: in children too young to have absorbed any doctrine, in the brain, and in what people do when nobody is making them do anything.

Start with the youngest evidence. Felix Warneken and Michael Tomasello put twenty-month-old infants in a room with an adult who dropped something out of reach. Most of the toddlers helped, unprompted, and kept helping over repeated trials. Then came the manipulation. Some children received a small material reward for helping, some received praise, some received nothing at all. In the later test phase, when no rewards were given to anyone, the children who had been paid helped less than the children who had been praised or ignored.

"This so-called overjustification effect suggests that even the earliest helping behaviors of young children are intrinsically motivated and that socialization practices involving extrinsic rewards can undermine this tendency."

A twenty-month-old knows nothing about wages, careers or exploitation. The disposition was there before any of that, and a token was enough to dent it. Ryan and Deci describe the same thing from the developmental side: "from the time of birth, children, in their healthiest states, are active, inquisitive, curious, and playful, even in the absence of specific rewards."

The same pattern had already been found in preschoolers. Mark Lepper, David Greene and Richard Nisbett selected children who spent their free play drawing with markers because they liked drawing with markers. One group was promised a certificate for doing it, one got the same certificate as a surprise afterwards, one got nothing. Weeks later, in ordinary free play, the promised-reward children drew noticeably less than either of the other groups, who had not changed at all. The reward was not the problem. Turning play into a transaction was the problem. A later experiment in the same programme found that simple surveillance did similar damage.

The effect has a name, the overjustification effect, and the reasoning behind it is unflattering to the way most institutions operate. Offered a reward for something they were already doing, people quietly revise their account of why they are doing it, and the reward is by far the more visible reason. Withdraw it later and the original reason has already been written over.

Modern neuroscience has begun to describe the machinery. The idea it is describing is older than the tools: Harry Harlow coined the term intrinsic motivation in 1950, after watching subjects solve puzzles that paid them nothing at all. Reviewing the current literature, Stefano Di Domenico and Richard Ryan define intrinsic motivation as the spontaneous tendency to be curious and interested, to seek out challenges and to develop one's skills even in the absence of any separable reward, and conclude that these exploratory and mastery behaviours are evolutionarily ancient and supported by dopaminergic systems. What that dopamine signals is closer to wanting than to liking: not the calm of satisfaction but the pull towards the next unexplored thing. They are careful about it, calling the field emerging and the dopamine account an initial working hypothesis, and so should we be. It is a direction of evidence rather than a settled mechanism.

So far this all supports the romantic view. Here is the correction it needs.

Richard Ryan and Edward Deci built their entire research programme on a sentence that refuses both easy answers:

"Human beings can be proactive and engaged or, alternatively, passive and alienated, largely as a function of the social conditions in which they develop and function."

They are equally clear that the tendency is not self-sustaining: "despite the fact that humans are liberally endowed with intrinsic motivational tendencies, the evidence is now clear that the maintenance and enhancement of this inherent propensity requires supportive conditions, as it can be fairly readily disrupted by various nonsupportive conditions." Their own summary of intrinsic motivation as "the natural human propensity to learn and assimilate" is a claim about our nature, and so is the warning attached to it. Curiosity is standard equipment. It is also easy to break.

Self-determination theory names three conditions it needs, and they are ordinary enough to recognise from any week of your own life. Autonomy is the sense that what you are doing is yours: I chose this, this is my decision, nobody is standing behind me. Competence is the pull towards getting better at something, the reason people voluntarily take on problems slightly too hard for them and feel cheated by problems that are too easy. Relatedness is doing it among people whose opinion of you means something. Satisfy the three and self-motivation grows. Thwart them and it degrades into exactly the passivity that Theory X treats as the human baseline. The tendency is natural, its expression is conditional, and both halves matter, because the first half alone produces a fantasy in which you need only remove the boss, and the second half alone produces a factory floor.

What do adults actually do when the question is put to them properly? Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Judith LeFevre followed seventy-eight workers for a week, interrupting them at random moments to ask what they were doing and how it felt. The great majority of reported flow states, moments of high challenge matched by high skill, occurred while working rather than during free time, even though the same people said they would rather be at leisure. A 2014 replication with a hundred employees and over four thousand measurements found the same imbalance. People underrate the very state that absorbs them, and they are drawn to challenge while believing they want rest.

And when the challenge is removed entirely? Timothy Wilson and colleagues left participants alone in a bare room for six to fifteen minutes with nothing to do but think. Across eleven studies people disliked it. In one version they could press a button to give themselves an electric shock. Two-thirds of the men and a quarter of the women did so, all of them people who had earlier said they would pay money to avoid that shock. The authors' conclusion is dry and damning: most people seem to prefer doing something rather than nothing, even when the something is unpleasant.

That is the shape of the answer. We are not built for idleness, and we do not have to be tricked into curiosity.

But one honest concession remains, and it belongs to the other side. Effort genuinely is costly and we do conserve it. Michael Inzlicht, Amitai Shenhav and Christopher Olivola call this only half the story, since people also pursue effort on purpose, choosing mountains, hard problems and long training precisely because they are difficult. We conserve effort and we hunger for the right kind of it, and which one shows up depends on whether the effort is ours.

So: is a human being lazy by nature? The evidence says the default is exploratory, ancient, and visible before any culture gets to it, and also fragile in a specific way. It is switched off by being watched and controlled, by being paid to do what one was doing for its own sake, by having no say in how the work is done, by work that is identical every day, and by exhaustion. What we call laziness is usually the residue of one of those, which is why it moves when the conditions move.

Nobody has to teach a child to explore. What we teach, and teach efficiently, is when to stop.

The current scientific literature does not support the simplistic statement:

Humans are naturally lazy.

A more accurate summary would be:

Humans possess an innate tendency toward curiosity, exploration, learning, mastery, and creativity, while simultaneously conserving energy when effort appears unnecessary or unrewarding.

 

Sources:

Douglas McGregor, The Human Side of Enterprise (1960)

Warneken and Tomasello, Extrinsic Rewards Undermine Altruistic Tendencies in 20-Month-Olds (2008)

Lepper, Greene and Nisbett on undermining children's intrinsic interest (1973)

Ryan and Deci, self-determination theory (2000)

Ryan and Deci, Intrinsic and Extrinsic Motivations: Classic Definitions and New Directions (2000)

Di Domenico and Ryan, The Emerging Neuroscience of Intrinsic Motivation (2017)

Deci, Koestner and Ryan, meta-analysis of extrinsic rewards (1999)

Csikszentmihalyi and LeFevre, Optimal Experience in Work and Leisure (1989)

Wilson et al., Just Think: The Challenges of the Disengaged Mind, Science (2014)

Inzlicht, Shenhav and Olivola, The Effort Paradox (2018)

— E. Deci, R. Ryan, F. Warneken