Extrinsic vs. Intrinsic Motivation: What’s the Difference?

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.

intrinsic extrinsic motivation

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.

Everyday examples make this concrete. A student immerses herself in a subject out of genuine curiosity. Someone else studies to become more well-rounded, or bakes at weekends purely for the satisfaction of it.

All three are 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). CET explains how outside events, such as rewards, feedback, and deadlines, affect motivation that comes from within (Deci & Ryan, 1985).

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 were rewarded for drawing with felt-tip pens or for playing maths games. Then the rewards stopped. They spent significantly less time on those activities, falling below the baseline measured before any reward was 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 drawn to challenge and mastery: a task hard enough to stretch them, achievable enough to reward practice. Remove the challenge and the motivation goes with it. Competing against a much weaker opponent no longer tests competence, so intrinsic drive falls.

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

Rewards are not uniformly risky. Their effect depends on the kind of reward and on how it is delivered.

  • Tangible and expected: money, prizes, and gold stars promised in advance for doing a task are the rewards that most reliably undermine intrinsic motivation.
  • Verbal praise: genuine positive feedback usually strengthens intrinsic motivation, because it satisfies the need to feel competent.
  • Unexpected rewards: a reward that arrives as a surprise, or that is not tied to doing the task, rarely undermines interest.
  • Low initial interest: where there is little intrinsic interest to erode, a reward can usefully start engagement and support internalisation.

The practical rule follows. Use extrinsic rewards for tasks a person does not already enjoy, and informational feedback for tasks they do.

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.

A reward also carries a social message. It signals that a person, group, or institution approves of the activity. That approval holds whether or not the reward will be offered again.

The pull can outlast the interest. A promise of further tangible or social rewards can motivate someone to repeat a previously rewarded activity, even one that never interested them (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.

Sometimes a reward backfires. When people are rewarded for an activity they already enjoy, they can experience the overjustification effect.

The reward makes them reattribute their behaviour from internal interest to external incentive. What was once “play” is recoded as “work done for reward.”

The consequences are lasting.

Consider children who already enjoy maths games. Place them in a reward programme, then withdraw the rewards. Interest in the games often falls below where it started.

The reward did not supplement their motivation; it displaced it.

Empirical Research

Psychologists have posited two types of motivation theories: dualistic and multifaceted.

Dualistic theories divide motivation into two types, intrinsic and extrinsic. Multifaceted theories take a different view. They 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.

Two examples stand out. Thorndike studied problem-solving in cats, and Skinner studied elementary learning in rats and pigeons. The animals learned to press a bar, nudge a panel, or peck keys for food, water, or relief from pain (Thorndike & Bruce, 2017; Skinner, 2019).

These researchers were able to teach animals to perform complex sequences of actions (Sansone and Harackiewicz, 2000).

That consensus did not hold. 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

  1. Contingency: Noncontingent rewards are less damaging, and more often helpful, than rewards tied to task engagement, completion, or performance.
  2. Expectation: Expecting and then receiving a reward for an activity was enough on its own to reduce later interest in it (Lepper & Greene, 1975).
  3. Reward type: Intangible rewards such as verbal feedback are less likely to cause harm than tangible ones.
  4. Competence information: Rewards that give evidence of someone’s competence have more positive effects than rewards carrying no competence information.
  5. Initial interest: Expected tangible rewards undermine interest in activities people already enjoy. They can raise interest in tasks that held little appeal to begin with (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

The finding emerged three times over.

In the early 1970s, three laboratories tested the same idea (Deci, 1971; Kruglanski, Friedman, and Zeevi, 1971; Lepper, Greene, and Nisbett, 1973). Each found that rewarding an activity someone already enjoyed undermined their later interest in it (Sansone and Harackiewicz, 2000).

In Deci’s 1971 experiment, researchers offered undergraduate students $1 for each three-dimensional manipulative puzzle that they solved correctly.

Deci then left the laboratory. With the experimenter gone, no money was on offer for solving another puzzle. He measured how long students kept working on the puzzles anyway.

The unpaid students carried on working on the puzzles after the researchers left. The paid students did not. Once the money stopped, the puzzles had lost their incentive value for them.

According to Deci and Ryan’s (1985) self-determination theory, extrinsic incentives can undermine intrinsic interest.

Consider a boy who loves playing football. He 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

Early experimental research suggested the two are opposed (Deci, 1971; Kruglanski, Friedman, and Zeevi, 1971; Lepper, Greene, and Nisbett, 1973).

Not every reward behaved that way. Deci (1971) also tested verbal rewards on the puzzle task. After students solved it, researchers told them their solution time was “much better than average” compared with their peers.

These verbal rewards raised later intrinsic motivation (Sansone and Harackiewicz, 2000).

Tangible incentives behave differently. Kruglanski et al. (1971) offered half a sample of Israeli high school students an extrinsic incentive for taking part in a series of laboratory experiments.

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.

The costs showed up across several measures. They listed fewer unusual uses for everyday objects, and recalled less of what they had just done.

They were also less likely to show a Zeigarnik effect: the tendency to recall interrupted tasks better than completed ones (Sansone and Harackiewicz, 2000).

Lepper et al. (1973) ran the last of these experiments.

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.

The children returned to free play one to two weeks later, with the markers available and no reward on offer.

Only the expected-reward group had changed. They spent about half as much free-choice time drawing as the other two groups, and their drawings were rated lower in quality.

Expectation of the reward, not its receipt, was the active ingredient (Lepper, Greene, and Nisbett, 1973; Sansone and Harackiewicz, 2000). These findings shaped Deci and Ryan’s (1985) self-determination theory.

That early line of research treated the two motivations as mutually exclusive. Later findings disagree. Lepper et al. (1997) reported that intrinsic and extrinsic motivation are not necessarily negatively correlated.

Their studies of students measured both kinds of motivator. Curiosity and interest are intrinsic motivators. Pleasing the teacher or earning a good grade are extrinsic ones. The two correlated positively and significantly.

This persisted when the studies were replicated in larger populations of students (Sansone and Harackiewicz, 2000).

Deci, Koestner, and Ryan (1999): Which Rewards Undermine?

By the 1990s the reward literature had grown contradictory. No single experiment could settle it.

  • Aim: To test whether the undermining effect depends on the type of reward and its contingency, rather than treating reward as one category.
  • Method: A meta-analysis of 128 laboratory experiments, indexed mainly by free-choice behaviour and self-reported interest. Rewards were coded as verbal or tangible, expected or unexpected, and by contingency.
  • Results: Pooled across reward types the effect looked modest. Disaggregated, expected tangible rewards tied to task performance reliably undermined free-choice motivation; verbal rewards enhanced it.
  • Conclusion: The conflict in the literature was an artefact of aggregation. The rewards most often used to control behaviour are the ones that erode intrinsic interest.

The undermining was strongest for children and for tasks that were already interesting. Most of the evidence is short-term laboratory work, so the size of the effect for real-world incentives such as pay remains debated.

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.

The continuum has two poles. At one end sits amotivation, where autonomy, competence, and relatedness go unsatisfied. At the other sits intrinsic motivation, where all three are met.

Most motivation falls in between. Ryan and Deci (2000) describe four forms of extrinsic regulation along that middle stretch:

  • External regulation: compliance for a reward or to avoid punishment. The behaviour stops when the contingency does.
  • Introjected regulation: acting under internal pressure, such as guilt, shame, or the wish to protect self-esteem.
  • Identified regulation: the person consciously values the goal and accepts it as personally important.
  • Integrated regulation: the goal is fully assimilated into the person’s sense of self and fits their other values.

Critical Evaluation

The Reward-Undermining Controversy

Not everyone accepts that rewards damage intrinsic motivation. Cameron and Pierce (1994) meta-analysed the reward experiments and reached the opposite verdict.

Pooling effects across reward types, they found little overall detriment to intrinsic motivation. Any negative effect, they argued, was confined to narrow conditions and outweighed in practice by the usefulness of reinforcement.

The objection to that analysis is simple. Collapsing reward types together is the very move that hides the effect, as Deci, Koestner, and Ryan (1999) showed by separating them.

The accepted resolution is that both sides were partly right. Rewards are not uniformly harmful, but one very common class of them is: tangible, expected, and tied to the task.

The dispute has not closed. Cameron and colleagues still hold that the practical undermining effect is small.

The evidence is also dominated by short-term laboratory studies, so its reach into real incentives such as salaries and scholarships stays genuinely contested.

Strengths and Limitations

The distinction has three clear strengths.

  • Replicated finding: the overjustification effect is one of the most reliably reproduced results in motivation research, shown behaviourally rather than only by self-report.
  • Testable boundaries: the account specifies which rewards undermine and when, rather than offering a vague warning that rewards are bad.
  • Practical reach: it yields concrete guidance for teachers, managers, coaches, and parents, reframing incentive design as a question of meaning rather than size.

Four limitations pull the other way.

  • Ecological validity: most evidence comes from short-term laboratory tasks, so the durability of the effect for high-stakes incentives such as pay is uncertain.
  • A blunt dichotomy: two boxes obscure the graded continuum of regulation, and the fact that curiosity and grade-consciousness can co-occur in one student.
  • Cultural boundaries: the premium placed on personal choice is an individualist construal; in interdependent contexts, choices made by trusted others can raise intrinsic motivation.
  • Measurement dependence: free-choice time and self-reported interest can diverge, and which one a study uses partly shaped the meta-analytic disputes.

Contemporary Research

Recent work has moved from re-demonstrating the undermining effect to measuring, at scale, which motivations predict which outcomes.

The strongest recent evidence comes from Howard, Bureau, Guay, Chong, and Ryan (2021).

  • Aim: To establish how each motivation type on the self-determination continuum relates to student outcomes, and to isolate the unique contribution of each.
  • Method: A meta-analysis of 344 samples and 223,209 participants, covering 26 outcomes across performance, well-being, goal orientation, and persistence.
  • Results: Intrinsic motivation predicted both success and well-being. Identified regulation predicted persistence most strongly, while external regulation predicted neither and was linked to reduced well-being.
  • Conclusion: The quality of motivation matters more than its quantity. The autonomous end of the continuum drives the outcomes educators want.

The pooled data are largely correlational and cross-sectional, so the direction of effect is inferred rather than proven.

Two further syntheses refine the classic story. Cerasoli, Nicklin, and Ford (2014) pooled 183 samples spanning 40 years. Intrinsic motivation was a strong predictor of work quality, operating alongside incentives rather than being displaced by them.

Digital settings look messier. Sailer and Homner’s (2020) meta-analysis found small but significant benefits of gamification, alongside substantial heterogeneity.

At the level of single elements, Mekler, Brühlmann, Tuch, and Opwis (2017) found that points, levels, and leaderboards raised output without raising intrinsic motivation.

How Do Intrinsic Motivation and Extrinsic Motivation Influence Learning?

Why Motivation Declines Through School

Schools have a long reputation for dullness. Writers from William Blake to Charles Dickens and Mark Twain portrayed them as a source of drudgery and misery (Sansone and Harackiewicz, 2000).

Educational scholars echoed the complaint, noting how little motivation students seemed to show in American classrooms (e.g., Bruner, 1962; Silberman, 1970).

Cross-national comparisons sharpened the concern. American students performed poorly against their peers (e.g., Stevenson, Chen, and Lee, 1993; Stevenson and Stigler, 1994). The developmental decline in school motivation became a theoretical priority.

One set of explanations for the decline in children’s intrinsic motivation is the role of social control in the American classroom (Winett and Winkler, 1972).

Some authors have noted that social control can increase as children progress through school (Condry, 1978).

Eccles et al. (1993) describe a mismatch. Early adolescents develop a thirst for autonomy and personal growth. Schools, meanwhile, tighten discipline, offer fewer decisions, and set less cognitively challenging coursework.

How Classrooms Can Support Intrinsic Motivation

Belonging comes first. Students are more likely to be intrinsically motivated to learn when they feel respected and included in the classroom.

De-emphasising evaluation helps too, as does letting students exercise some control over their own learning environment.

Task design matters as well. Work that is challenging yet doable, paired with a clear rationale for doing it, raises intrinsic motivation for the task (Niemiec & Ryan, 2009).

Key Takeaways

  • Definition: Intrinsic motivation comes from inside the person. Extrinsic motivation comes from an outside reward, grade, or penalty.
  • Not Opposites: The two can co-occur. A student can be genuinely curious about a subject and also want a good grade.
  • Regulation Continuum: Extrinsic motivation ranges from bare compliance to values a person has fully made their own.
  • Overjustification: Rewarding an activity someone already enjoys can reduce their interest once the reward stops (Deci, 1971).
  • Which Rewards: A meta-analysis of 128 experiments found tangible, expected, task-tied rewards undermine interest, while verbal praise tends to raise it (Deci, Koestner, & Ryan, 1999).
  • Modern Evidence: Across 344 samples, intrinsic and identified motivation predicted achievement and well-being; external regulation predicted neither (Howard et al., 2021).

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Saul McLeod, PhD

BSc (Hons) Psychology, MRes, PhD, University of Manchester

Chartered Psychologist (CPsychol)

Saul McLeod, PhD, is a qualified psychology teacher with over 18 years of experience in further and higher education. He has been published in peer-reviewed journals, including the Journal of Clinical Psychology.


Charlotte Nickerson

Writer and Cognitive Engineer

AB History, Harvard University

Charlotte Nickerson is a Harvard graduate and cognitive engineer whose work sits at the intersection of social psychology, human behaviour, and technology design. She contributed over 100 articles to Simply Psychology and holds a Master's in Cognitive Engineering from ENSC.