Do financial rewards undermine motivation by prompting people to infer from theirincentivized choices that they only did a task because of the incentive? We examine thisprediction of the overjustification hypothesis by manipulating the salience and availability ofinitial (i.e., pre-incentive) task attitudes in repeated choices between tasks. While remindingpeople about their initial task attitude prior to the incentive arrested post-incentivedisengagement, we fail to find persistent disengagement after an incentive ends, when initialattitudes are not salient. Contrary to the prediction of overjustification that the negative longerterm effects of incentives will be magnified when all of a person’s initial choices to do a taskwere incentivized, we also find no evidence of any post-incentive reduction in that case. Overall,our results contradict inferential accounts of post-incentive behavior and instead point to the roleof perceived effort and justification. We discuss implications for dynamic consumer responses topromotions.
Figuring Out Preference or Balancing Out Effort: Do Inferences From Incentives Undermine Post-Incentive Motivation?
