Intrinsic Motivation in a New Light

Economics is solidly based on the workings of incentives. Extra rewards will increase and extra costs will decrease the frequency of a particular type of behavior. In sociology, Weber had pointed to a kind of behavior that was presumably not steered by incentives: value-rational behavior, found in religions and strong reasoned convictions. Because of an increasing rationalization of the world, Weber saw this kind of value-rational behavior slowly displaced by what he called goal-rational (zweckrational) behavior. Though often a popular topic of discussion, the displacement of value-rational by goal-rational behavior had never led to a viable research program within sociology. Instead, it was psychologists who had discovered a related issue of ‘intrinsic’ versus ‘extrinsic’ motivation. For intrinsically motivated behavior, there is no apparent reward but the behavior itself. The psychologists had been able to forge a booming program over many years. On this basis, Frey (1997) reintroduced the issue back into the social sciences which, in turn, drew attention to the work of these psychologists. Within psychology, the research by Deci (1971) and Lepper et al. (1973) was a pioneering stab at behaviorist theory by pointing to situations in which rewards decrease rather than increase the frequency of behavior. This work had spawned a thriving research paradigm (Deci and Ryan 1985)1 and a host of studies. Briefly, the findings converge to the following. Expected tangible rewards tend to reduce intrinsic motivation whereas praise and other posi-