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 and 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 activity’s inherent satisfaction. That might be 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.
Autonomy, Mastery, and Purpose
A popular shorthand names three ingredients of intrinsic motivation: autonomy, mastery, and purpose. They echo White’s (1959) effectance motivation, an innate drive to deal competently with the environment for the satisfaction of feeling effective.
- Autonomy: feeling that your actions come from your own choice. A teenager who picks her own guitar songs plays freely; practising scales to a parent’s timetable feels like an obligation.
- Mastery: a challenge hard enough to engage you but achievable enough to sustain progress. A keen baker perfecting croissant dough is rewarded by the clean layers themselves.
- Purpose: the sense that an activity serves something you value. A volunteer tutoring struggling readers finds unpaid work worthwhile because she cares about literacy.
Purpose shades into identified and integrated regulation, forms of extrinsic motivation that a person has made their own. That shows how porous the boundary between the two motivations becomes.
The feeling is pleasant. It is linked to deeper processing, greater creativity, and longer voluntary persistence.
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.
A compelling extrinsic reason leads people to underestimate how much genuine interest drove their engagement. They effectively recode it as “work done for reward.”
Classic research illustrates this clearly.
In a classic nursery-school study, children who already liked drawing with felt-tip pens were promised an award for drawing (Lepper, Greene, and Nisbett, 1973). One to two weeks later, with no award on offer, they spent about half as much free time drawing as children who had not expected one.
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. The controlling aspect signals pressure to achieve a specific outcome. The informational aspect conveys something meaningful about performance.
Feedback perceived as controlling, such as a parent pressuring an athlete to win, threatens autonomy and suppresses intrinsic motivation.
The cause of the behaviour now feels external. Cognitive evaluation theory calls this a shift in the perceived locus of causality, from internal to external.
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.
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.
- Parenting: Tangible rewards suit chores a child dislikes. They risk turning enjoyable activities, such as reading for pleasure, into obligations. Choice and a clear rationale build lasting values better than contingent rewards.
- Gamification: Points and badges help when they give genuine feedback on competence. Used only to control behaviour, they risk overjustification. When the points stop, so does the activity.
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. That outcome might be a financial reward, a grade, recognition, or the avoidance of a penalty.
The same behaviour can have either source.
A student who reads a science book from curiosity is intrinsically motivated. One who reads it only to pass an exam is extrinsically motivated.
Extrinsic motivation is not simply the opposite of intrinsic motivation. Most of adult life runs on it, since few people pay bills or attend dental appointments for the joy of it. What varies is how controlling, or how self-endorsed, the motive feels.
Types of Extrinsic Motivation
- Reward-based: motivation from external rewards, tangible or abstract. For example, an employee may meet a sales target for the promise of a bonus.
- Power-based: the desire to exert control over others. For example, a leader may be motivated to lead and inspire people through challenges.
- Fear-based: the desire to avoid a negative outcome. A manager may threaten to fine latecomers, or a student may study to avoid 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 (2000) identify three variables that shape how a reward affects later motivation:
- Continued instrumental value: a reward signals approval and the likelihood of further rewards for similar activity in future.
- Personal competence: rewards based on performance, not mere engagement, can raise perceived competence and, with it, intrinsic motivation.
- External control: a reward can signal that someone else controls the behaviour, lowering perceived autonomy and later intrinsic motivation.
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.
Someone rewarded for an activity or accomplishment in one setting may expect a similar reward for a similar one in 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 signal competence. Receiving one can raise someone’s perception of their own ability.
Higher perceived competence, in turn, raises 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.”
Deci’s (1971) puzzle experiment shows the cost. Once payment stopped, students who had been paid spent less free time on the puzzles than they had before the payments began.
The money had not added to their interest. It had changed the reason they gave themselves for acting, from enjoyment to payment.
Empirical Research
Psychologists have posited two types of motivation theories:
- Dualistic: theories that divide motivation into two types, intrinsic and extrinsic.
- Multifaceted: theories that recognise 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.
Theorists began to champion forms of “intrinsic motivation”: motivations that seemed intrinsic to many activities, regardless of rewards (Sansone and Harackiewicz, 2000).
Soon after psychologists distinguished intrinsic from extrinsic motivation, they began proposing hypotheses about how the two relate.
Summary of Research Findings
- Contingency: Noncontingent rewards are less damaging, and more often helpful, than rewards tied to task engagement, completion, or performance.
- Expectation: Expecting and then receiving a reward for an activity was enough on its own to reduce later interest in it (Lepper & Greene, 1975).
- Reward type: Intangible rewards such as verbal feedback are less likely to cause harm than tangible ones.
- Competence information: Rewards that give evidence of someone’s competence have more positive effects than rewards carrying no competence information.
- 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).
Early Experiments on Rewards and 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).
Deci (1971) ran the first of these experiments.
- Aim: To test whether paying people for an activity they already find interesting changes their intrinsic motivation to keep doing it.
- Method: Students worked on Soma puzzles over three sessions; only in the middle one did the experimental group earn $1 per configuration. Each session included a free-choice break when the experimenter left; unobserved time on the puzzles measured interest.
- Results: In the final, unpaid session, the paid students spent significantly less free time on the puzzles than at baseline. Never-paid controls showed no drop, and students given verbal praise showed increased later interest.
- Conclusion: Payment for an already interesting task lowered later intrinsic motivation, because it shifted the reason for acting from interest to money. Verbal reward worked as competence feedback and had the opposite effect.
The free-choice measure is behavioural rather than self-reported, and the same students lost interest after payment. The task was a trivial puzzle, the reward was small, and the sample was students. The study therefore shows the mechanism, not its real-world size.
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. The theory predicts that the money and the winning will undermine his enjoyment of the game.
In future, he will be less likely to play football without 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 incentive described themselves as less interested in the activities, and their performance 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.
- Aim: To test whether an expected reward for an activity children already enjoy undermines later interest, and whether the expectation or the reward itself matters.
- Method: Pre-school children who enjoyed drawing with felt-tip markers were promised a “Good Player” award, given it unexpectedly, or given none. One to two weeks later, observers blind to condition timed their free drawing.
- Results: Only the expected-reward group changed. They spent about half as much free time drawing as the other two groups, and their drawings were rated lower in quality.
- Conclusion: A promised reward reframed play as work. Expectation of the reward, not its receipt, was the active ingredient (Lepper, Greene, and Nisbett, 1973; Sansone and Harackiewicz, 2000).
The design pre-selected children with real baseline interest and contrasted expected with unexpected reward. The effect applies only to activities children already enjoy, and the follow-up was short.
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.
External and introjected regulation are controlled forms of extrinsic motivation. Identified and integrated regulation are autonomous forms.
The autonomous forms resemble intrinsic motivation in their benefits: steadier persistence, better performance, and higher well-being. The controlled forms tend to produce brittle engagement that collapses when the pressure ends.
Even integrated regulation stays distinct from intrinsic motivation, because the person still acts for a valued outcome rather than purely for interest.
Consider Maya doing her maths homework. Under external regulation, she works only because her parents would confiscate her phone otherwise. Under introjected regulation, she works to avoid shame.
Under identified regulation, she wants to be an engineer and values the maths that leads there. Under integrated regulation, being a numerate problem-solver has become part of her identity. When a problem simply grips her, she is intrinsically motivated.
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.
A fifth limitation challenges the construct itself. Reiss (2004) argues that White’s (1959) claim that curiosity, autonomy, play, and mastery share one root was never tested. Factor analysis of his 16 basic desires found them largely unrelated, with a mean correlation of about .15.
Related Theories of Motivation
The intrinsic-extrinsic distinction is one lens among several, and neighbouring theories sharpen it.
- Two-factor theory: In Herzberg’s theory, motivators such as achievement and the work itself are intrinsic to a job. Hygiene factors such as pay are extrinsic and only prevent dissatisfaction (Herzberg, Mausner, & Snyderman, 1959).
- Drive and arousal: Drive-reduction theory cannot explain play and curiosity (White, 1959). Arousal theory adds that people seek optimal stimulation, so challenge itself can reward.
- Goal-setting: Specific, difficult, accepted goals reliably raise performance (Locke & Latham, 2002). Goals direct effort; the intrinsic-extrinsic distinction shows whether that effort sustains itself.
- Self-efficacy: Bandura’s self-efficacy overlaps with the competence side of intrinsic motivation. It raises motivation most when paired with autonomy, not coercion.
Contemporary Research
Recent work has moved from re-demonstrating the undermining effect to measuring, at scale, which motivations predict which outcomes.
Motivation Type and Student 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 success and well-being, and identified regulation predicted persistence most strongly. External regulation predicted neither performance nor persistence 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.
Incentives and Work Performance
Cerasoli, Nicklin, and Ford (2014) pooled 183 samples spanning 40 years. Intrinsic motivation was a strong predictor of performance, especially the quality of work.
It worked alongside incentives rather than being displaced by them. Incentives tied directly to performance could crowd out the intrinsic contribution, but loosely tied incentives and intrinsic motivation operated largely in parallel.
A related meta-analysis found that satisfying the needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness predicted performance, and that incentive structure moderated the balance (Cerasoli, Nicklin, and Nassrelgrgawi, 2016).
Gamification and Digital Learning
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.
Hou, Jin, He, and Wang (2025) studied Generation Z college students in online “Study With Me” sessions. Peer support improved their learning outcomes. The effect ran partly through motivation and self-efficacy.
The design was single-sample and cross-sectional. It shows co-occurrence, not causation.
Brain and Clinical Research
Morris, Grehl, Rutter, Mehta, and Westwater (2022) reviewed the concept, measurement, and neurobiology of intrinsic motivation. They note that intrinsically and extrinsically motivated behaviour are computationally similar, since both aim to maximise reward value and minimise punishment.
Dysfunction in intrinsic motivation is also a transdiagnostic feature of psychiatric symptoms. The mechanisms remain poorly understood. The review therefore proposes better paradigms for measuring it.
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).
Tangible rewards are not the only lever. Cordova and Lepper (1996) found that wrapping lessons in a game-like fantasy, personalising them, and offering choice raised children’s intrinsic motivation, engagement, and depth of learning.
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 motivation predicted success and well-being. External regulation did not predict performance or persistence and was linked to lower well-being (Howard et al., 2021).
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Niemiec, C. P., & Ryan, R. M. (2009). Autonomy, competence, and relatedness in the classroom: Applying self-determination theory to educational practice. Theory and Research in Education, 7(2), 133-144. https://doi.org/10.1177/1477878509104318
Oudeyer, P.-Y., & Kaplan, F. (2007). What is intrinsic motivation? A typology of computational approaches. Frontiers in Neurorobotics, 1, Article 6. https://doi.org/10.3389/neuro.12.006.2007
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Ryan, R. M., & Deci, E. L. (2000). Intrinsic and extrinsic motivations: Classic definitions and new directions. Contemporary Educational Psychology, 25(1), 54-67. https://doi.org/10.1006/ceps.1999.1020
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Further Reading
- Herzberg’s Motivation Theory (Two-Factor Theory)
- Ryan, R. M., & Deci, E. L. (2000). Intrinsic and extrinsic motivations: Classic definitions and new directions. Contemporary Educational Psychology, 25(1), 54-67.
- Niemiec, C. P., & Ryan, R. M. (2009). Autonomy, competence, and relatedness in the classroom: Applying self-determination theory to educational practice. Theory and Research in Education, 7(2), 133-144.
- Oudeyer, P.-Y., & Kaplan, F. (2007). What is intrinsic motivation? A typology of computational approaches. Frontiers in Neurorobotics, 1, Article 6.
