Gamification is the application of game elements and digital game design techniques to non-game problems, such as business and social impact challenges. This course will teach you the mechanisms of gamification, why it has such tremendous potential, and how to use it effectively. For additional information on the concepts described in the course, you can purchase Professor Werbach's book For the Win: How Game Thinking Can Revolutionize Your Business in print or ebook format in several languages.
6.4 How Rewards Can Demotivate
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From the course by University of Pennsylvania
Gamification
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From the lesson
Motivation and Psychology
Gamification is a technique for motivation, so it ties very directly into psychology. This unit introduces the major psychological concepts relevant to gamification. The first lesson focuses on behavioral approaches and reward design; the second identifies the risks and alternatives to this approach.
Meet the Instructors
Kevin WerbachAssociate Professor
Legal Studies & Business Ethics
The biggest danger of rewards in gamification, is that the rewards will
actually demotivate. In other words, someone's already motivated to do
something. And the reward makes them, less likely to do it. How could that be? The
basic reason is that rewards, acting as extrinsic motivators can crowd out, the
intrinsic motivation that was already there. You start to focus so much on
chasing the reward that you think the reward is the reason to do the activity
and you no longer have the intrinsic motivation to do it that was there before.
So the ultimate result is you are less motivated than when you started. This is
sometimes also called the over justification effect and it's a danger in
any kind of system that uses rewards, including systems involving gamefication,
this substitution effect that the intrinsic motivation goes away and is
replaced by the less effective and problematic extrinsic motivation of the
rewards. Now, this may sound counter-intuitive, but it's been confirmed
by study after study in a wide range of areas. So here's some examples of some of
the studies that have shown this demotivating effect. The first one or set
of studies involves creative activities like drawing. And the experimenters would
give a group of kids some paper and pencils and crayons and say go draw. And
some of the kids were more into drawing than others, but some of the kids really
loved drawing. They just sat and did it. They drew great pictures and they did it
because they loved doing it, intrinsic motivation. Then the experimenter gave the
kids rewards, said alright. We're going to give you something for the drawing and
there are a variety of different rewards used. Maybe we'll give you an actual
tangible prize for the best drawing, maybe we'll just give you a gold star, good job.
Maybe we'll just give you a verbal compliment, well done, that's it. But in
each case the idea was not just draw for it's own sake, but draw for some reward.
And then, after doing that for a while, the experimenter took the reward away.
Now, kid s we're back to where we started, just go and draw for fun. What happened?
Low and behold, the kids who had been intrinsically motivated, they were going
to draw just for the fun of it. Once the reward was added and then taken away we're
no longer as motivated to draw and the drawings that came up with just weren't as
good. Because they have substituted that extrinsic motivation of the reward for
their intrinsic desire to draw. So, this has been replicated across many different
kinds of creative or artistic kinds of pursuits and you can think about this in
examples of gamefication that involves something creative. This is probably more
likely to be in an internal or enterprise case of gamefication than on some of the
external marketing ones, but. It's a real concern in those areas where the goal is
to motivate people to innovate and be creative, in business context and the
reward, the gamified system may actually push away from that. Second study came
from Israel, and it has to do with of all things, daycare pick-up. And in this case,
the researchers looked at a daycare centre where parents had to pick up their kids at
a certain time after work. And some of the parents were late. And the daycare center
didn't like that, it wasn't fair to them, they had to stick around more, and they
thought, well, how do we motivate the parents to come on time? And they thought,
alright, we'll use a punishment. Again, punishment is just a flip side of a
reward. It should work the same way in the opposite direction. We'll charge parents,
I don't remember what the number was but let's say $ten, anytime they are more than
five minutes late picking up their kids. And they thought this would incentivize
the parents to come on time. What happened? Parents came even later. Why?
Well, we can think about it if we look at what's going on in those parent's minds
subconsciously before what was getting them to pick up their kids on time. Social
pressure, desire to not inconvenience the workers at the daycare center and so
forth. Now all o f a sudden this is an economic exchange. It's worth $ten to pick
up my kids late. If the thing I've got going on at work, or whatever else is
happening, seems like it's worth more to me than $ten, I'll just pay the $ten and
all of those intrinsic motivations caring about the people at the daycare center,
caring about their kids getting picked up on time. Caring about other parents and so
forth, go out the window, it gets replaced by the extrinsic reward. And the effect,
in that case, is people come even later. Similarly studies of blood donation have
found that when encouraging people to donate blood, primarily based on civic
duty, and helping other people, and dealing with disasters and so forth. Is
replaced by primarily paying people to give blood, people are less likely to give
blood, it crowds out that intrinsic motivation. Final set of studies, and
these are somewhat controversial, suggest that teacher merit pay, paying teacher is
based on the results of the kids in their classes don't actually produce better
results. For the same reason, they tend to crowd out the intrinsic reasons for
teaching well and turn it into purely a calculus about how to get the desired
results for the reward. So, all of these kinds of studies suggests that there's a
danger in rewards that will actually make people less motivated to do the task, and
thus produce worse results than intended. A couple other aspects to these findings
that are worth highlighting. The first is, they, generally, these studies are
generally limited to what are called interesting tasks, i.e. Tasks that require
some creativity, that people have some reason to want to do. No task is
inherently interesting. And no task is inherently boring. So, I might not really
want to stamp out things on an assembly line all day long, but someone else might
find that challenging, to get it right every single time. That being said, there
are certainly tasks that are more interesting, generally speaking, for most
people than others. Tasks that require some creativity t hat require some thought
or problem solving or some ability. Those tend to be tasks that most people think of
as interesting. And so the study's about over-justification focus on tasks that
start off with some level of intrinsic motivation. Their tasks, that were
interesting to begin with at least at some level and reward seem to make them less
interesting. Second thing here is that the types of rewards do matter. So, I
described a number of different categories of rewards, and the over-justification
effect, the demotivating effect, is more true with some rewards than others. So for
example, tangible rewards tend to be where the largest demotivating effects happen.
Because those are things that are purely substituting something extrinsic.
Something external to the activity for the intrinsic motivation that's there.
Tangible rewards are the ones that you might think are the best possible rewards,
right? We'll give you a bonus or some thing of value in return for this
activity. Those are the greatest risk of substituting for the intrinsic motivation.
Conversely, if the reward is unexpected, if it's that surprise reward, hey guess
what, we just decided to give you a bonus for your good performance, that doesn't
have as much of an effect on intrinsic motivation because it didn't crowd out.
When the person was doing the thing, they were doing it for the intrinsic reason and
they were surprised by the reward. So random, or chance rewards that come about
without expectation don't tend to have as much of this kind of problem. And finally,
the other one that's interesting to talk about, performance contingent rewards. So
remember, these are the rewards that are based on achievement, actually doing
something effectively in the task, can go both ways. If the reward is simply saying,
the whole point is the end point, the goal as opposed to doing well, and the person
tends to take away from that, that this is really not about me and my accomplishment
but this is about some external thing, the performance leve l, then they're
demotivating. On the other hand, if the reward is seen as purely informational.
It's say, "You did a good job." This is recognizing the fact that you achieve
something. Your performance was great. It's all about your performance. The
reward is just a marker. Of what you did. Then, we don't see the same effect. Then,
there's not the demotivation. And this comes from a variety of papers by Ed Desi
and Rich Ryan and they're co-authors that who we're going to meet in more detail in
the next segment on self determination theory. This is one in which they did a
meta-analysis of over a hundred different papers on effects of rewards. And these
were some of the effects that they found on different categories of rewards. So, to
dig into more of why this happens and to cut it back to gamification, we need to
focus on the underlying theory that explains why certain kinds of intrinsic
motivators work and explains what kinds of things actually lead to intrinsic motivation.
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