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LIT-562: Pervasive negative effects of rewards on intrinsic motivation: The myth continues

2 min read

Properties6
StatusActive — read in full 2026-10-05 (NOTE-587), on the owner's instruction, from the article as hosted by the Cambridge Center for Behavioral Studies; the same article is free in PubMed Central (PMC2731358). Worth reading as the strongest case against pervasive reward undermining, by the authors of the rival meta-analysis, and as the paper that shows the coding scheme decides the result. Re-coding 145 studies by procedure, it finds no overall effect on free choice and enhancement on low-interest tasks. On interesting tasks it finds undermining only for expected tangible rewards loosely tied to performance or earned at less than the maximum, and neutral or positive effects for rewards tied to a score or to beating others. The core effect agrees with Deci et al.; the per-contingency sizes are in figures with no text layer.
Version2
Tagsmotivation, social-science, learning-and-conditioning
Compared againstLIT-557 — A meta-analytic review of experiments examining the effects of extrinsic rewards on intrinsic motivation
Cited as “paper” byNOTE-587 — Pervasive negative effects of rewards on intrinsic motivation: The myth continues
Cited as “source” byTHEORY-046 — Expected tangible rewards for merely engaging in an interesting task lower later free-choice engagement with it, THEORY-154 — Whether an expected tangible reward lowers or raises later intrinsic motivation depends on how tightly its stated contingency ties it to performance and success

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Judy Cameron, Katherine M. Banko and W. David Pierce (2001), The Behavior Analyst 24(1):1–44 — DOI-10.1007/BF03392017

Key takeaways

From the reading, NOTE-587.

  • The core effect is not in dispute. On interesting tasks, expected tangible rewards offered for doing the task lowered later free choice: K = 57, −0.35 before outliers, still negative after them (pp. 16–17). Deci, Koestner and Ryan (LIT-557) found −0.40 for the same contingency.
  • Coding decides the rest. Re-coded into seven procedural categories (Table 1, p. 12), CET’s performance-contingent category splits. Rewards for doing well and per unit solved undermine free choice. Rewards for surpassing a score do not. Rewards for exceeding others enhance it (pp. 16–18, Figure 2).
  • Per-unit undermining tracks earning less than the maximum: −0.22 (K = 14) against −0.03 (K = 6) when everyone earned it in full. The authors read this as failure feedback or time pressure (pp. 19–20, 23).
  • Low-interest tasks: rewards raised free choice, 0.28 (K = 12). This is outside Deci et al.’s scope (p. 15).
  • Small either way: about −0.30 for rewards for doing or doing well, roughly 47 seconds of an 8-minute free period (pp. 24–25).

Standing in the record

Filed at the owner’s request as the rejoinder to Deci, Koestner and Ryan (LIT-557) in the dispute over whether rewards undermine intrinsic motivation, and read on the owner’s instruction. It is compared_against that paper: it re-analyses the same literature, merges the two databases and sets its results beside Deci et al.’s contingency by contingency (Figures 2 and 4). It restates and keeps the conclusion of the authors’ own 1994 analysis (LIT-556), which stays unread. That relation is left undeclared.

It is the source of THEORY-154, the account that the tightness of a reward’s stated contingency decides its effect, which rivals cognitive evaluation theory (THEORY-049). It is also the second source of THEORY-046, the undermining effect on which both sides agree.

No instruction for machine-learning practice; nothing here belongs in the anthology.

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