Intrinsic motivation describes the undertaking of an activity for its inherent satisfaction, while extrinsic motivation describes behavior driven by external rewards or punishments.
Intrinsic motivation comes from within the individual, while extrinsic motivation comes from outside the individual.
Scholars have described several key differences between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation (Mitchell, 2013):
| Intrinsic Motivation | Extrinsic Motivation |
|---|---|
| Purpose of participation: Enjoyment in the process itself | Purpose of participation: Benefits derived from participating |
| Emotions experienced: Pleasant (enjoyment, freedom, relaxation) | Emotions experienced: Tension and pressure (social approval is not under direct control) |
| Rewards: Effective rewards (enjoyment, pleasure) | Rewards: Social or material rewards |
| More likely to stay with a task long-term | More likely to do a necessary task of little interest |
| Self-motivation to take on new tasks and innovate | Increases social learning compliance |
| Self-motivation to take on new tasks | Increases speed of task |
| Slower behavioral change | Removing rewards results in motivation loss |
What is Intrinsic Motivation?
Intrinsic motivation is the psychological force that arises from within a person rather than from separable external consequences.
It is grounded in the inherent satisfaction of an activity itself: the pleasure of learning, the pull of a challenge, or the simple enjoyment of doing something well.
When individuals are intrinsically motivated, they engage not for reward or recognition but because the activity itself is fulfilling.
A student who immerses herself in a subject out of genuine curiosity, a person who pursues education to become more well-rounded, or someone who bakes on weekends purely for the satisfaction of it are all acting on intrinsic motivation.
Psychological Needs
The theoretical backbone of intrinsic motivation is Self-Determination Theory (SDT) and its sub-theory, Cognitive Evaluation Theory (CET).
Both frameworks treat human beings as actively growing organisms who seek out opportunities to satisfy three universal, innate psychological needs:
- Autonomy: The need for choice, volition, and self-direction, so that behaviour aligns with personal values and interests rather than external pressure.
- Competence: The need to feel capable of mastering tasks, achieving meaningful outcomes, and engaging effectively with one’s environment.
- Relatedness: The need to feel connected to and cared for by others, and to experience a genuine sense of belonging.
When environments support all three needs, intrinsic motivation flourishes. In turn, this sustains mindfulness, positive affect, vitality, self-esteem, and performance across domains.
The Overjustification Effect
One of the most important vulnerabilities of intrinsic motivation is its susceptibility to the overjustification effect.
This occurs when external reinforcement is introduced for a behaviour the individual already enjoys.
The presence of a compelling extrinsic reason leads people to underestimate how much their engagement was driven by genuine interest, effectively recoding an enjoyable activity as “work done for reward.”
Classic research illustrates this clearly:
Children rewarded for drawing with felt-tip pens or playing maths games spent significantly less time on those activities once the rewards were withdrawn, compared to a baseline before rewards were introduced.
The reward had not supplemented their interest; it had displaced it, replacing intrinsic engagement with dependence on external incentives.
Nuances in Feedback and Rewards
Not all external input is damaging, however. The effect of a reward or piece of feedback depends substantially on its form and how it is interpreted.
- Tangible versus intangible rewards: Tangible rewards such as money tend to undermine intrinsic motivation more than intangible ones. Verbal praise and positive feedback, by contrast, can strengthen intrinsic drive in the right circumstances.
- Expected versus unexpected rewards: When a reward is anticipated before a task begins, intrinsic motivation typically declines. When it arrives as a surprise after completion, motivation tends to remain intact.
Controlling versus informational feedback:
Every external event carries two functional aspects: a controlling aspect, which signals pressure to achieve a specific outcome, and an informational aspect, which conveys something meaningful about performance.
Feedback perceived as controlling, such as a parent pressuring an athlete to win, threatens autonomy and suppresses intrinsic motivation.
Feedback perceived as informational, providing genuine, constructive insight, can satisfy the need for competence and sustain or even enhance motivation.
Praise that increases intrinsic motivation minimises evaluative pressure while maximising constructive, informational content.
The following strategies draw on this distinction to show how praise can build internal drive without inadvertently undermining it.
Real-World Applications
- Education: Students are more likely to be intrinsically motivated when they feel respected and included, when evaluation is de-emphasised, and when they retain some control over their learning. Tasks that are genuinely challenging yet achievable, paired with a clear rationale for undertaking them, strengthen this effect further.
- Workplace: Intrinsic motivation at work emerges when behaviour is driven by internal engagement rather than performance pressure: feeling valued, finding meaning in one’s role, and experiencing a sense of belonging within the organisation.
- Sport: Athletes are often drawn to their sport by the enjoyment of challenge and mastery. When that challenge disappears, so does the motivation. Competing against a significantly weaker opponent, for instance, can diminish intrinsic drive because the activity no longer tests competence in any meaningful way.
What is Extrinsic Motivation?
Extrinsic motivation is the drive to engage in an activity not for any inherent enjoyment it offers, but because of the external consequences it produces.
Where intrinsic motivation is rooted in the process, extrinsic motivation is oriented toward the outcome: obtaining a financial reward, earning a grade, gaining recognition, or avoiding a penalty.
Types of Extrinsic Motivation
- Reward-Based Motivation: reward-based motivation describes motivation resulting from external rewards, tangible or abstract. For example, an employee may be motivated to meet a sales target because of the promise of a bonus.
- Power-Based Motivation: power-based motivation is a form of extrinsic motivation reliant upon the desire to exert control over others. For example, a leader may be motivated to lead and inspire people to overcome challenges.
- Fear-Based Motivation: Finally, fear-based motivation describes the desire to avoid an extrinsically negative result. For example, a manager may threaten to fine those who are late to work, or a student may study for a test out of fear of a bad grade.
When to Use Extrinsic Motivation
Intrinsically motivated behaviors are performed because of the sense of personal satisfaction that they
bring, while extrinsically motivated behaviors are performed in order to receive something from others.
Sansone and Harackiewicz suggest that there are three variables that can affect the effect of rewards on later motivation (2000):
Perceptions of Continued Instrumental Value
Receiving extrinsic rewards can convey information about the likelihood of further tangible or socially extrinsic rewards in future related situations.
Those who receive a tangible reward for a particular activity or accomplishment in one setting may expect a similar reward for a similar activity or accomplishment in the future.
Receiving a reward, regardless of whether or not it is available in the future, can convey that an individual, group, or institution would be pleased by and is likely to approve of one’s engagement in similar tasks in the future.
The promise of continued extrinsic tangible or social rewards can motivate one to engage in a previously rewarded activity, regardless of whether it was of initial intrinsic interest to the person (Sansone and Harackiewicz, 2000).
Perceptions of Personal Competence
Extrinsic rewards can also communicate information about competence, and receiving a reward can enhance someone’s perceptions of competence.
Thus, increasing someone’s perceived competence can lead to increases in intrinsic motivation (Sansone, 1986).
These perceptions are more likely if rewards are based on performance rather than merely engagement or completion (Sansone and Harackiewicz, 2000).
Perceptions of External Control
extrinsic rewards can also convey information about someone’s level of personal control or autonomy. Receiving extrinsic rewards can decrease perceptions of autonomy and, thus, subsequent intrinsic motivation.
Subsequently, people may be less likely to engage in similar tasks when they do not expect tangible or social extrinsic rewards (Sansone and Harackiewicz, 2000).
The Risk: The Overjustification Effect
Despite their power, extrinsic rewards carry a significant psychological cost.
When individuals receive external reinforcement for an activity they already find intrinsically enjoyable, they can experience the overjustification effect:
The reward causes them to reattribute their behaviour from internal interest to external incentive, effectively recoding what was once “play” as “work done for reward.”
The consequences are lasting.
Children who inherently enjoy maths games and are then placed in a reward programme often show markedly reduced interest in those games once the rewards are withdrawn, spending less time on them than they did before the programme began.
The reward did not supplement their motivation; it displaced it.
Empirical Research
Psychologists have posited two types of motivation theories: dualistic and multifaceted.
While dualistic theories divide motivation into two types, intrinsic and extrinsic, multifaceted theories recognize a number of genetically distinct motives, such as hunger, curiosity, positive self-regard, fear, sex, and power (Reiss, 2004).
For the first half of the 20th century, psychologists focused primarily on instrumental learning and extrinsic motivation.
Typically, psychologists who conducted such studies attempted to link the receipt of an arbitrary reinforcer to the performance of an arbitrary response.
For example, Thorndike’s early studies of problem-solving in cats (2017) and Skinner’s work on elementary learning in rats and pigeons (2019) involved rats, cats, or pigeons being taught to press a bar, nudge a panel, or peck keys in order to obtain food, water, or relief from pain.
These researchers were able to teach animals to perform complex sequences of actions (Sansone and Harackiewicz, 2000).
However, in the latter half of the 20th century, psychologists posited a number of challenges to this model of extrinsic motivation.
Particularly, theorists sought to champion forms of “intrinsic motivation” — motivations seemingly intrinsic to many activities regardless of rewards (Sansone and Harackiewicz, 2000).
Shortly after psychologists differentiated between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, they created various hypotheses about the relationships between these two types of motivation.
Summary of Research Findings
- Noncontingent external rewards are less likely to produce detrimental effects and more likely to produce positive effects on later intrinsic motivation than rewards contingent on task engagement, completion, or performance.
- Expectation and receipt of an extrinsic reward for engaging in an activity was sufficient to
produce decreased intrinsic interest in the activity (Lepper & Greene, 1975). - Intangible extrinsic rewards (such as verbal feedback) are less likely to produce adverse effects than tangible rewards.
- Rewards providing evidence of someone’s competence have more positive effects on intrinsic motivation than rewards that do not provide information about competence.
- Researchers have also suggested the importance of high initial interest in deliberately selecting activities that are of high intrinsic interest to participants in the original experiments; while expected tangible rewards can undermine interest in activities of high initial interest, they can enhance interest in tasks originally of little initial interest (Calder and Staw, 1975; Danner and Lonky, 1981; Loveland and Olley, 1979; Sansone and Harackiewicz, 2000).
The effects of extrinsic rewards on children’s intrinsic motivation
In the early 1970s, three laboratories found that offering extrinsic rewards for something of intrinsic interest to someone actually undermined subsequent intrinsic interest in those activities (Deci, 1971; Kruglanski, Friedman, and Zeevi, 1971; Lepper, Greene, and Nisbett, 1973; Sansone and Harackiewicz, 2000).
In Deci’s 1971 experiment, researchers offered undergraduate students $1 for each three-dimensional manipulative puzzle that they solved correctly.
While doing this, Deci observed the amount of time that students spent working with the same activity when the experimenter left the laboratory, meaning that there was no longer a monetary reward for completing the activity.
While students who did not receive payment dependent upon whether or not they solved the puzzles continued to work on the same puzzles after the researchers left, students in the extrinsic incentive condition spent less time with the puzzles, as they no longer held an incentive value.
According to Deci and Ryan’s (1985) self-determination theory, extrinsic incentives can undermine intrinsic interest.
For example, consider a boy who loves to play football for the sake of playing football who is then offered money for winning.
According to self-determination theory, extrinsic incentives — such as money and winning — undermine the boy’s intrinsic enjoyment of football.
In the future, according to this theory, the boy will be less likely to play football in the absence of an extrinsic reward (Reiss, 2012).
Intrinsic and extrinsic motivation as distinct constructs
Generally, early experimental research suggests that intrinsic and extrinsic motivation are opposed (Deci, 1971; Kruglanski, Friedman, and Zeevi, 1971; Lepper, Greene, and Nissbett, 1973).
Deci (1971) examined the effect of verbal rewards for performance on the puzzle task. After solving the puzzle task, researchers gave students the feedback that their time to the solution was “much better than average” than their peers.
The receipt of these verbal rewards increased later intrinsic motivation (Sansone and Harackiewicz, 2000).
Another study supporting that extrinsic and intrinsic motivation are opposed was conducted by Kruglanski et al. (1971), who offered half of a sample of Israeli high school students an extrinsic incentive for participating in a series of experiments in the laboratory.
Those given an extrinsic incentive for participating in the tasks described themselves as less interested in the activities, and their performance on the tasks themselves suffered.
For example, they showed less creativity in listing unusual uses for everyday objects, lower recall of the activities they had just undertaken, and were less likely to show significant Zeigarnik effects (a higher recall of uncompleted or interrupted tasks) (Sansone and Harackiewicz 2000).
The last of the initial experiments to show extrinsic and intrinsic motivation’s opposition was conducted by Lepper et al. (1973).
In these experiments, Lepper et al. selected children on the basis of their high levels of intrinsic interest in drawing pictures with markers in preschool classrooms.
The researchers then asked the children to do the same activity under one of three conditions:
- the expected award condition, where children were shown a reward and asked if they would like to work on the activity in order to win one of the rewards;
- the unexpected-award condition, where children received the reward and feedback at the end of the session; and the no-award condition,
- where children received verbal feedback but no tangible reward.
Again, upon observing the children later, the researchers found that only those in the expected-reward condition lost interest in drawing with the markers (Sansone and Harackiewicz, 2000). These findings shaped Deci and Ryan’s (1985) self-determination theory.
Despite an early line of research arguing that intrinsic and extrinsic motivation are mutually exclusive, more recent findings, such as those of Lepper et al. (1997), have found that intrinsic and extrinsic motivation are not necessarily in negative correlation with each other.
For example, Lepper et al. ‘s studies of extrinsic and intrinsic motivation in students found that there was a significant positive correlation between curiosity and interest (intrinsic motivators) and attempting to please the teacher or receive a good grade (extrinsic motivators).
This persisted when the studies were replicated in larger populations of students (Sansone and Harackiewicz, 2000).
Intrinsic and extrinsic motivation as a continuum
Ryan and Deci (2000) stressed the notion that extrinsic and intrinsic motivators can combine in the self-determination continuum.
According to the self-determination continuum, people can be motivated — where their psychological needs of autonomy, competence, and relatedness are not met, intrinsically motivated (where all of these needs are met), or somewhere in between.
Ryan and Deci describe the last case as extrinsic motivation in the form of external regulation, introjected regulation, identified regulation, or integrated regulation (2000).
How Do Intrinsic Motivation and Extrinsic Motivation Influence Learning?
Western thinkers ranging from Willliam Blake to Charles Dickens and Mark Twain have traditionally portrayed schools as a source of drudgery, ennui, and misery (Sansone and Harackiewicz, 2000), and educational scholars have acknowledged the lack of motivation students seemingly display in American classrooms (e.g., Bruner, 1962; Silberman, 1970).
In the face of the poor performance of American students in cross-national comparisons of academic accomplishment (e.g., Stevenson, Chen, and Lee, 1993; Stevenson and Stigler, 1994), developmental decrease in motivation in American schools had been of theoretical interest.
One set of explanations for the decline in children’s intrinsic motivation is the role of social control in the American classroom (Winnett and Winkler, 1971).
Some authors have noted that social control can increase as children progress through school (Condry, 1978).
In particular, Eccles et al. note that as early adolescents develop a thirst for increased autonomy and personal growth, schools seem to increase their focus on discipline, provide fewer opportunities for decision-making, and assign less cognitively challenging coursework (1993).
In educational settings, students are more likely to experience intrinsic motivation to learn when they feel a sense of belonging and respect in the classroom.
This internalization can be enhanced if the evaluative aspects of the classroom are de-emphasized and if students feel that they exercise some control over the learning environment.
Furthermore, providing students with activities that are challenging yet doable, along with a rationale for engaging in various learning activities, can enhance intrinsic motivation for those tasks (Niemiec & Ryan, 2009).
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