What motivates us - Rewards in Gamification part 2

As pretty much everything in life cannot be limited to either being black or white, but rather something kind of greyish color in between, so is the entire idea of behaviorism and reward structures within gamification (and in general). As much as rewards are a wonderful incentive to get people to do something they initially maybe didn’t really want to do, they can also demotivate. And this happens especially when you are already intrinsically motivated.

If you are already intrinsically motivated, extrinsic motivations can cloud your inner motivation, simply because you focus so much on chasing the extrinsic reward, that you no longer have that inner motivation. This is also called “Overjustification Effect”, meaning when an expected external incentive decreases your intrinsic motivation for doing something. What basically happens is, you substitute your inner motivation with an external reward and inner motivation usually trumps external rewards (unless the reward is so large, that you throw your principles and inner motivation out of the window, as in “hey I would have done this for a higher cause, buuuuut they are offering me 10 Million monies and I really want that money).

There are many studies, which have shown this, let me introduce you to two:

(1) Kids were given pens and paper so they could just draw and they did so, because they simply enjoyed drawing (intrinsic motivation). Afterwards kids were given a reward for drawing (golden star, verbal confirmation „great job“). So, now kids drew not for their own sake or the sake of drawing, but for the reward. Then in the next phase, the rewards were taken away again. And guess what? Kids didn’t feel like drawing anymore, or the pictures just didn’t turn out as beautiful as they did before. Why? Because they substituted the intrinsic motivation for extrinsic motivation and once they didn’t get the reward anymore, the intrinsic motivation decreased.

(2) Daycare staff were fed up that parents were always late for picking up their kids, so they thought, “lets charge ‘em money”, thinking this would incentivize them to be on time. What happened? Parents actually came even later. So what made these parents (try to) pick up their kids on time before? Love, social pressure, making daycare staff happy. And why did this backfire? By letting parents pay to be late, we have an economic exchange, meaning all intrinsic motivation (like, I don’t want to annoy the cay care staff) were diminished and in their minds it was somehow ok being late, because you end up paying for it.

Demotivating rewards are also very dependent on the type of reward:

(1) Tangible rewards (I know when I do this I get a cookie): Can have the largest demotivating effect on your intrinsic motivation, because they are purely substituting intrinsic motivation.

(2) Unexpected rewards (Uh, I did this and look at that, I received a cookie): The effect here is limited. People didn’t know they were receiving a reward so they were anyway intrinsically motivated, of course they are then happy about the surprise, buuut once you surprise them, they start expecting it.

(3) Performance contingent rewards (Rewards are based on your achievement: Uh I only ate 3 cookies today, so I receive an apple): When rewarda are about performance and purely used as an indicator it can actually have a strong effect on your motivation.

Long story short, reward structures are awesome. However, when tasks are already interesting and users already feel like doing them anyway, rewards structures can backfire. As with everything in life, do not just simply add gamification to your product, find out what moves your users and then add gamified aspects.

#reward #behaviorism #motivation #gamification