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.
