Title: What Do You Enjoy Doing? | Psychology Today
Headings: What Do You Enjoy Doing?
Art Markman Ph.D.
What Do You Enjoy Doing?
A challenge can be an enjoyable thing.

Content: So, in a second study over a thousand people were tracked for a week at a time. Participants wore a watched that beeped at random times of the day. When it beeped, participants were supposed to fill out a survey about what they were doing, why they were doing it, how much they enjoyed it, and they answered questions about whether the activity was challenging and whether they were performing well. There are two nice aspects of this method. First, the researchers were able to sample a large number of activities. Second, some of these activities were being done for extrinsic reasons (the participant had to do them) and others were being done for intrinsic reasons (the participant wanted to do them). An interesting pattern emerged. People generally enjoyed intrinsically motivated activities more than extrinsically motivated activities. For all activities, participants enjoyed them more when they thought they were doing them well than when they thought they were doing them poorly. However, the results for challenging tasks depended on the reason for doing them.