There\u27s no wrong choice : personalizing incentives to maximize motivation

Previous studies have found that when people are intrinsically motivated to perform a task without any form of payment, offering additional external payments as an incentive for the task can crowd-out the inner motivation and actually decrease performance or participation. I set up an experiment presenting inner motivation and external payments as inversely related and allowed subjects to choose individual levels of compensation in order to determine if framing the incentives this way can not only prevent crowding-out, but also act as an overall stronger motivational scheme. Subjects who were able to choose their own levels of compensation not only outperformed the other subjects, but the results show that despite a wide range of inner and monetary incentives chosen, all of those given a choice gave approximately the same high levels of effort