When reward reduces the desire to act
A series of experiments showed that a reward could diminish interest in an activity people already enjoyed. What this result means for paid work has been the subject of a long disagreement.
The founding experiment
In 1971, Edward Deci asked students to solve puzzles. Some of them were paid for each solution, then the payment stopped. During a break in which they were free to do as they pleased, those who had been paid spent less time on the puzzle than the others.
In 1973 Mark Lepper, David Greene and Richard Nisbett obtained a similar result with young children who liked drawing. Those who had been promised a certificate for their drawings subsequently drew less spontaneously than those who had received it without expecting it.
The proposed explanation
Deci and Richard Ryan interpret these results within cognitive evaluation theory. A reward perceived as a means of control would shift the reason for acting to the outside, whereas a reward perceived as information about competence could, on the contrary, sustain interest.
Details therefore matter a great deal: whether the reward is expected or unexpected, tied to mere participation or to the level achieved. The predicted effects vary with these features, which makes the theory more nuanced than the slogan that money kills motivation.
A disagreement between syntheses
In 1994 Judy Cameron and David Pierce published a meta-analysis concluding that the negative effect is confined to narrow conditions. Deci, Richard Koestner and Ryan replied in 1999 with another synthesis, which found a clear negative effect of rewards that are expected and tied to the task.
The two teams differ above all on the choice of studies included and on how to group them. The disagreement concerns less the existence of the effect than its extent and its generality.
The extension to economics
Bruno Frey transposed the idea to economics under the name of the crowding-out effect. An experiment by Uri Gneezy and Aldo Rustichini, published in 2000, showed that introducing a fine for late pick-ups at day-care centres in Haifa increased late arrivals instead of reducing them.
Their reading is that the fine turned a moral obligation into a transaction: lateness now had a price. This case does not concern a reward, but it illustrates the same mechanism of a change of frame.
Transposing it to work
Most of these experiments use activities considered interesting in themselves, and observe free, short-lived behaviour. Salaried work combines very diverse tasks, all of them paid, which makes direct transposition uncertain.
A further difficulty lies in measurement. In the laboratory, motivation is observed through the time freely devoted to the activity; in companies, it is most often self-reported in questionnaires, which do not capture the same phenomenon and are exposed to other biases.
Studies conducted in organisations find effects in both directions depending on the type of task and the form of pay. They do not make it possible to come down in favour of any one mode of pay in general.
Key points
Experiments from the 1970s show that an expected reward can reduce interest in an enjoyed activity.
Meta-analyses disagree on the extent of the effect, depending on the studies included.
Transposition to paid work remains uncertain and depends on the type of task.
This article describes documented mechanisms and disagreements. It recommends no position, no party and no vote, and commits to no reading other than that of the work it cites.
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