Diving Into Extrinsic Motivation, Part 1: Tangible Versus Intangible

If you study assessment, inevitably you eventually end up in the world of cognitive and behavioral psychology reading all about motivation. At least that's been my journey. I've found that I rarely actually read books and studies on grading and assessment themselves because I spend all my time studying what's going on behind the scenes in terms of motivation. One particular study caught my attention. It's a study from 1971 about the effective of rewards on motivation. Now, this idea isn't new, that extrinsic rewards can impact intrinsic motivation. We hear it all the time in educational circles. 

The piece that's often missing that this article points out, though, is that we don't make enough of a distinction between the types of extrinsic motivation when talking about the potential harm it can cause. The quote below is the one that really got me thinking.

“The difference, then, between money and social approval as external rewards lies in the person’s perception of the locus of control of his behavior. While with money he could readily come to accept the reward as the reason for his behavior, he is less apt to do this when the rewards are verbal reinforcements. In the latter case, the approval rewards may not be phenomenologically distinct from the feelings of satisfaction which the person gets from performing the activity.” (Deci, 1971)

 What this quote and a good chunk of the study talks about is that not all extrinsic motivators are made the same. What I've come to understand is that there's essentially two major categories of extrinsic motivators, and the best way I can explain them is to separate them into tangible extrinsic motivators and intangible extrinsic motivators. 

To explain the difference, a tangible motivator is essentially one that can be commodified, or used to "purchase" something else. What this means is that a tangible extrinsic motivator because a means to another goal. It is a currency that can be used to purchase something else. Think about money for a job. We work the job to get the money, but we do that so that we can actually pursue our real goals. The same can be said about grades. The way grades often work in school is as currency, sadly. We do things in class to get a grade so that eventually we get to pursue the kind of life we want. This makes grades a tangible extrinsic motivator. 

Compare this, then, to something like social approval, which is an extrinsic motivator. While it's possible that social approval can be seen as as something we use to pursue other goals, it operates very differently than money or grades. I can't take someone's compliment and then use it to buy something I want. I can't take a high five and use it to get into college. These are intangible motivators. They can't be used as a currency to pursue other goals. 

Here's where the difference matters. According to the quote above, the intangible motivators are so closely connected to the satisfaction of completing the task itself that they don't impact our view of the task. 

However, tangible motivators function very differently. Because we use the tangible motivators to pursue other goals, the value of the activity begins to shift towards the reward because that's the thing we actually use to pursue the other goals. When we repeat this process enough (and especially when that messaging is reinforced over and over - "you need to get good grades to go to college") we begin to only see value in the reward, not the process. This is called the Overjustification Effect, and the scary part about it, is that not only does it mean that we begin to be uninterested in boring tasks, but that we begin to lose interest in tasks that were previously interesting to us intrinsically. 

This is why we so often hear the rhetoric of "extrinsic bad, intrinsic good," but I think that is a far too simplistic view of extrinsic motivators. Yes, tangible extrinsic motivators often times distort processes (like the learning process and the value of the learning itself), but this doesn't mean that all extrinsic motivators are inherently harmful. 

In the study above, the effect of intangible extrinsic motivators was found to be nearly non-existent in terms of diminishing the enjoyment of an activity or diminishing the value placed on the activity itself. 

While there are a million other aspects of extrinsic motivation that I'll dive into in subsequent posts, the big thing to take away from this post is this: If you want to use extrinsic motivation in the classroom, focus on using intangible motivators if you want to ensure the activity of learning itself doesn't lose its power. 

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