Cash incentives however do not always reduce demonstrable performance, even if they damage motivation. Fairly consistently, introducing a monetary incentive to a task that was intrinsically motivating reduces subjects’ sense of intrinsic desire (and/or interest and satisfaction). Let’s tackle these in order.įor the sake of simplicity, most research into motivation and the effect of extrinsic rewards has used cash as the tested incentive. Principally, these center on the question of what constitutes an intrinsic or extrinsic reward (matched to motivation, but markedly different), and how we leverage this to create desired behaviors. While there is little disagreement about points 1 and 2 above, there are two areas where some degree of conflict emerges both in the science and its practical application in gamification. We need to know what rewards users will value so that we can focus our efforts and capital on useful incentives.Research suggests that this alignment also produces higher quality outcomes (particularly when we measure tasks that require a great deal of sophisticated thinking and perseverance).Closer alignment with users’ intrinsic motivations produces greater satisfaction.Over the course of a year, you may experience many different motivational states related to your work: intrinsic love of the activity, extrinsic desire for a paycheck, intrinsic need to be recognized for achievement, extrinsic desire for the employee of the month parking space.īut why do we care to understand intrinsic and extrinsic motivators in the first place? There are three main reasons: Consider your average, run of the mill corporate job. In other words, if an extrinsic motivator is found to be meaningful, pleasurable and consistent with a person’s worldview, he/she can adopt it as though it were intrinsic.Ĭlearly, in every human-system interaction, we can see a complex interplay of motivational states at play over-polarizing their relationship would be a mistake. For example, holistic concepts like Self-Determination Theory posit, among other things, that these motivations are fluid people can convert extrinsic motivators to intrinsic if they internalize the desire to do so. Though most people intuitively understand this division, it’s not as clear cut as it may seem. Extrinsic motivation pushes you to do (or avoid) something because of an external reward or punishment. In simple terms, intrinsic motivation is an innate drive to do something (or your pursuit of activities that are rewarding in and of themselves). Broadly speaking, most people divide motivation into two camps – intrinsic and extrinsic. At the risk of sounding old, it was also hot during my thesis work, researching the psychology of gifted children over 15 years ago. One of the hottest current issues is the question of human motivation. But while you don’t need a psychology degree to design great, intrinsically meaningful products/services, it is useful for us to delve a bit deeper where Gamification is concerned. For product designers, strategists and marketing executives, motivational theory is simply intuitive – you design products, brands and experiences to match innate consumer desires as a matter of course. Chief among them has been something resembling a debate about gamification’s role in shaping behavior and its alignment with theories of human motivation. With extraordinary early successes and a rapidly-growing body of case studies highlighting the power of Gamification, many questions still remain.
This emerging discipline – at the intersection of loyalty, behavioral economics and game design – is growing dramatically, with Gartner Group projecting that 70% of the world’s biggest companies will be actively using gamification by 2015. Gamification is the use of game thinking and game mechanics to engage audiences and solve problems.