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   Dr. Cat Hicks (grimalkina@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 22-May-2025 04:03:10 JST Dr. Cat Hicks

   I have been looking at research in software engineering about "motivation." I find it disappointing. It's not uncommon for work to state (without evidence) that software engineers are noticeably distinct from the general population in how their motivation functions. Why would this be true? On what grounds? It may be distinct in the way that every occupation and professional endeavor creates specific PRACTICES for it to be exercised, but the argument that core *psychology itself* differs?!

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     Dr. Cat Hicks (grimalkina@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 22-May-2025 04:03:03 JST Dr. Cat Hicks

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     If I have to suffer while I read generalizations about software engineers, YOU have to suffer

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     Paul Cantrell (inthehands@hachyderm.io)'s status on Thursday, 22-May-2025 04:03:03 JST Paul Cantrell

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     @grimalkina
     Heaven help us

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     Dr. Cat Hicks (grimalkina@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 22-May-2025 04:03:04 JST Dr. Cat Hicks

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     "Motivation", as a core psychological process, includes things like working toward your family's survival, attempting to achieve deeply meaningful experience, or even simply taking care of yourself. This is a very big part of human experience. I am sure we can all think of very difficult times in our lives when we saw this system take many hits and perhaps we "lost our motivation." This is not a small quirk but a major feature of many very difficult human experiences.

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     Dr. Cat Hicks (grimalkina@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 22-May-2025 04:03:04 JST Dr. Cat Hicks

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     That's why understanding it & the theories about it matters to me; yes there's "plugging back in a little bit to your task the next day" but there's also, "persisting in a career that will transform your socioeconomic safety, despite many years-long insults". Motivation is big, like all major psychological processes are big; I believe people deserve to understand their own motivational systems so that they can invest in them and nurture them as best we can. It is a precious sociocognitive cycle

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     Dr. Cat Hicks (grimalkina@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 22-May-2025 04:03:04 JST Dr. Cat Hicks

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     Curious about motivation? This is a huge area but I have a personal suggestion. Read scientists like Dr. Kristy Robinson. Her papers are excellent and will start to connect you with the many networks and threads of theory across this big area.

     https://www.mcgill.ca/education/kristy-robinson

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     Dr. Cat Hicks (grimalkina@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 22-May-2025 04:03:05 JST Dr. Cat Hicks

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     Because motivation to engage in complex work typically declines over time, we know that people face many barriers in sustaining motivation. So understanding why and how motivation is sustained is a critical question in almost all areas of psychology that touch on motivation. But imagine this multisystems process and how diverse it is: likely for some people an innate characteristic serves their motivation (e.g., a high curiosity?), but just bc that connection could be there doesn't give us all

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     Dr. Cat Hicks (grimalkina@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 22-May-2025 04:03:05 JST Dr. Cat Hicks

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     In real-world intervention science we are interested not just in cherry-picking niche little associations like this, but in picking interventions that will benefit the MOST people and in understanding strategies that will help the MOST people over the LONGEST time. So that could look like decreasing the cost of achieving something or understanding why many novice learners make inaccurate appraisals (this is a common one!), plus increasing the value of achievement

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     Dr. Cat Hicks (grimalkina@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 22-May-2025 04:03:05 JST Dr. Cat Hicks

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     Any time we are engaging with a population of many people, millions in the case of software engineers, we need to be concerned with designing for psychological processes that will benefit a VAST RANGE OF HUMANS. This means people who differ in emotional resources, cognition, their life circumstances, levels of support, illlness, etc. It is exactly like designing for the public school system. Our goal is to serve all, not anoint a few people and limit our gaze to them

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     Dr. Cat Hicks (grimalkina@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 22-May-2025 04:03:06 JST Dr. Cat Hicks

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     Am I reading ALL of this just to justify a single line in my book chapter right now that says, "many of these [software engineering] studies neither mention a theory of motivation, nor use theories about how motivation works to interpret their findings....", and then go on to use just psychology research on motivation for the rest of the chapter, maybe

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     Dr. Cat Hicks (grimalkina@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 22-May-2025 04:03:06 JST Dr. Cat Hicks

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     Let me tell you a little bit about motivation from a psychology POV because I simply do not want you to be bereft like this

     Motivation is a PROCESS which operates OVER TIME and functions with MANY COMPONENTS. It is not a fixed personality trait. It can wax and wane, and it is accessible to MANY PEOPLE with VERY DIVERSE MINDS. It is considered to be a core way that we enact goal-directed behavior. So we take a behavioral perspective on it

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     Dr. Cat Hicks (grimalkina@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 22-May-2025 04:03:06 JST Dr. Cat Hicks

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     Most contemporary research on motivation is not looking at blindly dumping people into fixed groups on this. Rather, we seek to understand the complex interplay that lies behind the behavioral choices we make over time. These include our expectations (so our appraisals of our immediate situation and likelihoods of success), the value we assign to our behavior (this could be intrinsic, or utilitarian), and the costs associated (also complex with many components, opportunity, effort and so on)

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     Dr. Cat Hicks (grimalkina@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 22-May-2025 04:03:07 JST Dr. Cat Hicks

     in reply to

     TECHNICALLY COMPETENT IS NOT AN INNATE PERSONALITY TRAIT WTF

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     Dr. Cat Hicks (grimalkina@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 22-May-2025 04:03:07 JST Dr. Cat Hicks

     in reply to

     *me dancing around on hot coals* oh my god oh my god oh my god oh my god oh my god oh my god

     the literature does not know what a trait vs a state is

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     Dr. Cat Hicks (grimalkina@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 22-May-2025 04:03:07 JST Dr. Cat Hicks

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     HOW IS "THINKING" A PERSONALITY TRAIT I am going to throw my laptop into the ocean

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     Dr. Cat Hicks (grimalkina@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 22-May-2025 04:03:08 JST Dr. Cat Hicks

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     I am deeply troubled by the general trend of method: "get a bunch of software developers to list things about themselves, cluster those things into larger categories, and say that we have revealed the INNATE CHARACTERISTICS OF SOFTWARE DEVELOPERS" that way lies both madness and the same selection bias that led us to infer that you had to be a white man to do math.

     The clustering of preferences in this way reveals as much about the *sampling probabilities* of opportunity as anything else

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     Dr. Cat Hicks (grimalkina@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 22-May-2025 04:03:08 JST Dr. Cat Hicks

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     Do I believe that on average there might be some personality differences we could detect as large trends across these sets of occupations? idk, I would be open to entertaining evidence, but I also believe that doing this kind of research is NOTORIOUSLY COMPLEX and requires a lot of holistic thinking e.g., the pitfalls of overgeneralizing about a possible group difference are well known and many, and retrospective self-reporting random preferences sure isn't a great way to reveal personality imho

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     Dr. Cat Hicks (grimalkina@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 22-May-2025 04:03:08 JST Dr. Cat Hicks

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     Yeah, now that I've put my finger on it, the fact that this is PERSONALITY DIFFERENCE research under titles that say "motivation" is explaining a LOT. It really has been bugging me why people seem so fixated on wonky old models about personality in software. This is another essentialist plank in the highly fixed-mindset world of software.

     What a baffling field of beliefs you all have constructed, truly. Growth is possible but ONLY for the "different" who were born that way (capable of growth).

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     Dr. Cat Hicks (grimalkina@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 22-May-2025 04:03:09 JST Dr. Cat Hicks

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     Some of these papers feel like they were written by first or second year graduate students who are very proud to be the first person to ever think that a human experience occurs when a human is present even though there is also a computer in the room.

     I find this patting-ourselves-on-the-back attitude quite troubling.

     It is astonishing to me that a basic literature review of MOTIVATION THEORIES, one of the most basic topics in the psychology of achievement, is lacking from a lot of these.

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     Dr. Cat Hicks (grimalkina@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 22-May-2025 04:03:09 JST Dr. Cat Hicks

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     Clearly it is an easy slam-dunk acceptance formula for some venues to say:

     - Astonishingly, software engineers have a psychology
     - No one knows anything about it so we shall invent a theory from scratch
     - here is our theory
     - we're going to tie our theory to a bunch of half-assed assertions about how special you all are, nudge nudge, wink wink, we're the only ones who Truly Get You
     - Profit, I guess

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     Dr. Cat Hicks (grimalkina@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 22-May-2025 04:03:09 JST Dr. Cat Hicks

     in reply to

     There is a ton of "this is secretly personality differences research masquerading as motivation research" in here.

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     Paul Cantrell (inthehands@hachyderm.io)'s status on Thursday, 22-May-2025 04:09:06 JST Paul Cantrell

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     @grimalkina
     Like…these are •explicitly listed• learning goals in our second-semester CS course. Because these things are a part of software development. Because doing a bad job at these things kills far more software projects than lack of knowledge of the time complexity of some sorting algorithm or whatever. Because seriously, I can’t even.