Overjustification effect
The overjustification effect occurs when an expected external incentive such as money or prizes decreases a person's intrinsic motivation to perform a task.
In one of the earliest demonstrations of this effect, Edward Deci and his colleagues conducted a laboratory experiment in 1971 where subjects showing baseline interest in solving a puzzle were exposed to two different conditions.
[5] Laboratory studies in the 1970s indicated that individuals under conditions with extrinsic rewards showed diminished intrinsic motivation.
Intrinsic motivation increases if individuals interpret rewards as pertaining positive information about their own competence and self-control over results, whereas if they interpret the results as indicative of external control, this decreases their feelings of self-control and competence, which in turn decreases intrinsic motivation.
Social cues can exert either positive or negative effects on intrinsic motivation depending on the messages that the context conveys regarding a person's autonomy and competence.
The study reported that managerial autonomy support which included provision of options, giving relevant information in a non-autonomous way, acknowledging subordinates' perspectives and cultivating self-initiation resulted in employees having more positive work-related attitudes such as higher level of job satisfaction and increased level of trust in corporate management.
The Deci study gives far less weight to self reports, however self-reports about subjects' level of internal motivation seem to be a more direct measure of the psychological state of interest.
[12] Considerable research has also shown that rewards tend to enhance feelings of competence and autonomy and high standards, pressure and competitiveness are able to increase these effects.
Also in the past 30 years, notable academic reviews of rewards have confirmed that monetary incentives have shown to significantly increase performance.
According to Deci et al. (1999), the negative effects extrinsic contingencies have on intrinsic motivation seem to be more severe for children than college students.
One possible explanation is that college students have greater cognitive capacity, enabling them to better separate informational and controlling aspects of rewards.
This also has severe ramifications on the education system, as it seems to almost undermine children's spontaneous interest in the process of learning itself, instead their motivation is driven by these extrinsic rewards.
Research in this area suggests that parents and educators should rely on intrinsic motivation and preserve feelings of autonomy and competence as much as possible.
[15] When the task is unattractive and intrinsic motivation is insufficient (e.g., household chores), then extrinsic rewards are useful to provide incentives for behavior.
School programs that provide money or prizes for reading books have been criticized for their potential to reduce intrinsic motivation by overjustification.
According to the theory, task non-contingent rewards like benefits that are based on things other than performance, such as employment that do not consist of any information regarding autonomy and competence, will have no effect on intrinsic motivation.
The Shirom, Westman, and Melamed (1999) study found that pay-for-performance plans resulted in lower well being in blue-collar workers, and this was especially evident for those who felt that their jobs were monotonous.
Drawing directly on self-determination theory, these critics of gamification express concerns that gamified contexts such as foursquare might provide expected rewards for activities that do not adequately meet self-determination theory's three innate needs for intrinsic motivation—relatedness, autonomy, and competence—and therefore reduce intrinsic interest in those activities.
