In this video I explain the distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation and then discuss the overjustification effect demonstrated in a study by Mark Lepper, David Greene, and Richard Nisbett in 1973. Then I consider how the overjustification effect may relate to work in fields like art, music, or athletics and how it may also influence the intrinsic motivation of students who receive external rewards for their academic achievements.
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Video Transcript
Hi, I’m Michael Corayer and this is Psych Exam Review. In the previous video I talked about how we might categorize motivations into different categories of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, and in this video we’re going to look at an even more general distinction we can make between different types of motivations. This is the distinction between intrinsic motivations and extrinsic motivations.
So essentially we’re asking the question about a motivation of, why did you do some behavior? And we can have one of two responses; either you did it because of some internal sense of satisfaction for doing that behavior, that would be an intrinsic motivation, it’s coming from within you, or we could say that you did the behavior because of something external to you, something that’s an extrinsic motivation, which means it’s based on external rewards or external punishments.
Now when we start thinking about this distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic motivations we can actually find an ironic effect of rewards and this brings us to a classic study by Mark Lepper, David Greene, and Richard Nisbett conducted in 1973. And what Lepper, Greene, and Nisbett did was they observed preschool students and they observed drawing behavior. So when the kids had some free playtime the researchers observed how often do the kids draw. How much time do they spend drawing?
And then after observing, getting a baseline of the drawing behavior that was occurring, they introduced awards. They introduced a “good player award” that would be given to the students who drew pictures during the free time. And then after a short time of having these rewards, they discontinued the reward program. “Sorry, we don’t have any more good player awards, but you can still draw as much as you’d like” and then they continued to observe the drawing behavior.
And what Lepper, Greene, and Nisbett found was first some baseline of drawing behavior and then, as expected, when the rewards were introduced we saw an increase in the drawing behavior. Suddenly the kids were drawing like mad because they wanted to get this award. And this is exactly what a behaviorist psychologist would expect. They’d look at it: “Yeah, of course. You provide reinforcement for a behavior, and the behavior increases. By definition that’s what reinforcement does.”
Then when the reward stopped, though, rather than just returning to the baseline, what they found was that it actually dropped below. So now the children were spending less time drawing than they used to before the study began, before these rewards were introduced, right? And so we might think, you know, if we reinforce the behavior that would encourage you to do it and we think maybe you would continue doing it after the rewards stop. You’d learn how much you like drawing or you’d get better at it, and so you’d enjoy it even more. But that’s not what Lepper, Greene, and Nisbett found, right?
They found what’s referred to as the “overjustification effect“. So the idea of the overjustification event is that extrinsic rewards can replace or maybe displace our intrinsic motivation. So in this case the kids were drawing because they enjoy drawing initially, and then they were drawing for rewards, right, not for their own creativity or their sense of accomplishment. They were drawing because they wanted to get that external reward. And in fact the researchers also had some judges, who were blind to the conditions of the experiment, so they didn’t know when these drawings were created, and they were just shown these children’s drawings and they were rating them. You know, how much creativity? How much effort went into this drawing? And what happened was the drawings that were produced during this reward period were rated lower than the other drawings. In other words, the kids were less creative. They were just dashing off these drawings just so they could get that award and they weren’t really putting much effort or thought or creativity into what they were producing.
Now we also have a study from 1999 where Edward Deci, Richard Koestner, and Richard Ryan looked at a number of different studies and they concluded that it did seem to be the case that tangible rewards can reduce intrinsic motivation. And I say tangible rewards here because that doesn’t include verbal praise. So it doesn’t seem to be the case that if you just tell someone oh, you know, “great job drawing that” you know you’re going to ruin their love of drawing. But if you start giving a tangible reward for it then you might see this overjustification effect occur.
And now we can think more broadly about what this means. What does this mean for people who get involved in a certain career or a certain field because they really enjoy it? They have an intrinsic motivation to create artwork or to play music or they play a sport for the love of the game. We might wonder well what happens when we start providing external rewards for these behaviors? What happens when an artist starts selling his art or a musician starts getting paid to play or an athlete starts getting paid to compete? We might wonder whether this is going to undermine their intrinsic motivation.
And we can also think about students and education and I wonder about programs like rewards for grades programs. This is where local businesses might offer discounts or even free products to students who have high grades on their report cards. So you can bring your report card and if you have As you can get a free ice-cream or something like that. We might wonder whether these programs are actually undermining the intrinsic motivation of these students. So in the short term they may appear to work, you know, students might, you know, bring their report cards to these businesses and show that they have more A’s and they want to get these free products. But what happens when they graduate? What happens when they’re no longer in school? Are they still going to be motivated to learn on their own? Or are we teaching them that learning is work? Learning is something that you do for external rewards rather than a process of growth and discovery?
So I might think that in the short-term we can start rewarding something like reading. So we offer these external rewards for every book that a child reads and wouldn’t that be great it will encourage more reading. We might wonder what happens when that program ends. What happens when the kids now are on their own and they don’t get a reward for finishing a book? Will they be as interested in reading? Will they see it as something that’s enjoyable on its own, you know, for its own sake? This is a process of growth and discovery and learning new things that you didn’t know before, or will they see it as “well you read books so that you can get these rewards”?
Alright so that’s the basic idea of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation and the overjustification effect and so in the next video we’ll start looking at the problem that we don’t always get to do what we want. There’s some things we have to do, we don’t want to do them, we’re not intrinsically motivated, but we still have to do them. And we’ll also look at the idea that sometimes we don’t get rewards right away. We have long delays between the work that we do now and when the benefits are actually accrued. And we’ll also look at one ironic effect of punishment. So I hope you found this helpful, if so, please like the video and subscribe to the channel for more. Thanks for watching!
