I’m confused about why extrinsic motivation reduces intrinsic motivation. If I reward someone for doing something, I’d expect them to develop an urge to do that thing. That was described in a recent post about habit formation. How did the teachers manage to kill motivation by giving rewards? Maybe there was some other effect, like “anything adults tell us to do is uncool”?
Behavioral experiments have shown that if you reward an action consistently, every time, and then stop rewarding it, animals will learn the behavior, repeat it, and then stop shortly after the rewards do.
However, if you reward an action inconsistently, and gradually decrease the frequency of rewards, many animals will continue long after the rewards have stopped.
I have neither a citation nor an excellent memory of the methodology of the experiment, but IIRC it was done with apes, levers, poker chips and grapes sometime in the late 90′s.
I think the theory theory is that if actions are extrinsically rewarded, the narrative that gets formed is “I did X because the teacher gave me candy”, not “I did X because I really like and value doing it.” Thus later, when there is no reward (or punishment) offered, the person doesn’t have a narrative for why they would want to do X anyway.
Agreed, though–it confuses my intuition, that rewarding a behaviour would reduce intrinsic motivation.
(I know that the name doesn’t explain anything but I figured telling you what it is called would be helpful if you wished to research the reasons that people believe that it happens.)
I’m confused about why extrinsic motivation reduces intrinsic motivation. If I reward someone for doing something, I’d expect them to develop an urge to do that thing. That was described in a recent post about habit formation. How did the teachers manage to kill motivation by giving rewards? Maybe there was some other effect, like “anything adults tell us to do is uncool”?
Behavioral experiments have shown that if you reward an action consistently, every time, and then stop rewarding it, animals will learn the behavior, repeat it, and then stop shortly after the rewards do.
However, if you reward an action inconsistently, and gradually decrease the frequency of rewards, many animals will continue long after the rewards have stopped.
I have neither a citation nor an excellent memory of the methodology of the experiment, but IIRC it was done with apes, levers, poker chips and grapes sometime in the late 90′s.
Plugging your terms into Google turned up some immediate links. This one seems to have behaviorism references to the underlying studies.
I think the theory theory is that if actions are extrinsically rewarded, the narrative that gets formed is “I did X because the teacher gave me candy”, not “I did X because I really like and value doing it.” Thus later, when there is no reward (or punishment) offered, the person doesn’t have a narrative for why they would want to do X anyway.
Agreed, though–it confuses my intuition, that rewarding a behaviour would reduce intrinsic motivation.
It’s called the “Overjustification effect”.
(I know that the name doesn’t explain anything but I figured telling you what it is called would be helpful if you wished to research the reasons that people believe that it happens.)