[Choofers]

Originally Posted by megamon88

Actually, I learned the opposite of this in psych class (I just had a test yesterday, go figure).

It turns out that when people do a task expecting a reward, their intrinsic motivation for that task decreases as opposed to if they had been rewarded after the task without being notified of the reward prior to finishing it, or if they had not been rewarded at all.

Here's an article explaining the study that the effect originated from: http://explorable.com/overjustification-effect.html

Basically, the researchers went to a nursery school and observed the children’s intrinsic interest in various school activities. The 3- to 5-year old children were made to play and draw using felt-tipped pens and were at the same time, put into one of three different conditions for the experiment:

- First Condition: The Expected Award Condition
In this condition, the children were promised to receive a “Good Player” ribbon for participating in the activity where they will be drawing with the use of felt-tipped pens. Take note that the kids have already been doing this activity ever since, and with pure intrinsic interest.

- Second Condition: Unexpected Award Condition
In this condition, the children were not told about the reward they would be getting until they actually finished the activity.

- Third Condition: No-Reward Condition
Lastly, in this third condition, the children were not told or given any kind of reward. This group of kids served as the control group, since extrinsic rewards were not involved either before or after the said activity.


Later on, the children were again observed in a free-play setting to find out whether there is a significant difference in the number of children participating in the same activity, this time, without any promise of a reward. Here's a graph of what happened when they let the kids play:



As you can see, the kids who were originally given an incentive to drawing spent considerably less time doing it by themselves without reward, thus illustrating the decline of instrinsic motivation with the presence of rewards.

It's a really interesting effect, and if you want to do more reading into I suggest you do - psychology in general is really interesting.

STEPMANIAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
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