I am indeed one of those unfortunate souls without a methods course under his belt so a lot of this is about the recommended pages. As a result I'm more interested in pointing out what I thought was interesting and relevant instead of an all-emcompassing summary.

By looking at three types of approaches (motivational 628, attributional 630, and behavioral 630) these authors discovered several findings, mainly that tangible rewards undermine intrinsic motivation of interesting activities (650). Likewise, verbal and tangible rewards tend to act in different directions so that verbal rewards largely positively affected instrinsic motivations while tangible rewards (as discussed) had a negative impact.

What I thought was most interesting about this the idea that verbal rewards especially affected college-aged students and that tangible rewards were more detrimental for children than for college students (657). This made me take a step back to realize that so far this semester I have not even considered the age of my target audinece. Specifically, I've always targeted users who largely resemble me, but especially as we design communities we need to consider children (and possibly?) extrapolate this to the more adolescent-minded members of our communities. So for example, positive verbal feedback may be more effectie for juvenile tasks than other more "high-brow" tasks. Regardless of the target age, I think this is an important distinction to make, which is probably doubly increased when crossing this with gender differences. 

Paul asked me to repost this from last week.  So, here it is:

Self Determination Theory- The theory focuses on the degree to which people
endorse their actions at the highest level of reflection and engage in
the actions with a full sense of choice.

Beck’s section on Self Determination Theory seemed to me to
be a great baseline for how to better build equilibrium within an online community:

1)      Provide users with autonomy; within cgsociety.org you can elect to become a paying
member or not.  They both have similarities up to a point and then there is a vast differentiation among both.  At this point the site gives you
the feeling that you are free to choose the best possible alternative to meet
your needs as a digital artist. 

2)      Reinforce the feeling of a users sense of competence; 
this is where it is vital to know your audience very well so as to
anticipate what they can and can’t do. Polling members of Epicurious.com on whether or not a bot should be used to make necessary edits/updates to the hundreds of thousands of food recipes that exist on the site would probably be counter productive as it would more than
likely intimidate and confuse members who are typically not technically
oriented .

3)      Relatedness,  cgsociety.org does an extremely good job of
promoting a true sense of connectivity and even a level of interdependence that
works to the advantage of the community by holding different levels of
competitions.  It is not uncommon for the Forum leaders to hold 48 hour group competitions where they will ask members to consolidate their talents and skills and share amongst each other to reach a competitive goal (ex. Create a 3d model of the Louvre grounds in Paris).  The group must then coordinate itself and divide the tasks necessary while cooperating to reach their goal.

Incentive:  In case you were wondering what the incentive
is for the above competition, to enhance individual skills through group
work.  Not unlike the foundations course SI501!

I can't open this file "because itis either not a supported file type or because the file has been damaged".

Anyone else having trouble?

John Blair

This reading supported the previous readings regarding the effects of rewards on intrinsic motivation.  As I read though, especially the reference to Bem (1972) Attributional Approaches pg 630, I wondered if perhaps another explanation for why informational postive feedback leads to more intrinsic motivation might be explained by the subjects emotional perception to the reward / feedback.  In aligning to categories of the readings, I think this could be called interpersonal perspective.  Where the subject somehow emotional attaches significance to the feedback in the desire to improve and been seen more favobably in the eyes of the tester.  I'm sure this is not a new theory or even one that hasn't been tested - perhaps I'm assembling it from recollections of previous readings. 

The two studies showing where informational postive feedback results in more intrinsic motivation are (Ryan 1982) and (Pittman, Davey, et-al 1980) both on page 629.  The idea for the interpersonal perspective merely takes the results from these two studies a step further in asking why doe the informational feedback result in more motivation.  Perhaps the controlling statements were interpretated as pressure, though I don't believe so, given their postive message and reaffirming tone.  The informational messages left somewhat of a question as to exactly where the subject stood in relation to others.  This goes back to last week's readings as well as Csíkszentmihályi from this week; be clear, provide meaningful timely feedback, know the audience and provide an appropriate reward, but don't over do it.

This reading has some interesting implications for how to design for rewards without spoiling people's intrinsic motivations in an online community.

My first takeaway was to generally stay away from tangible rewards. There are some cases where tangible rewards don't decrease intrinsic motivation, but in general, they seem detrimental.

Second takeaway is that either tangible or verbal rewards are more likely to support rather than replace intrinsic motivation when they are unexpected. In an online community, a simple way to do this would be to randomize rewards for good behavior. But I think an even better way is to allow other community members to do the rewarding for you. The points system is a great example of this. It is similar to face-to-face interactions, where people have opportunities to spontaneously praise and encourage others.

For me the most interesting part of this article was the discussion of Cognitive Evaluation Theory, which proposes that rewards can be interpreted by recipients in different ways - either as controllers of their behavior, or indicators of their competence. This is something I hadn't considered before, and it matters in online communities because it shows that the way in which you frame your rewards is important. Are your rewards seen as controlling, pressuring users to think, feel, or behave in certain ways in order to get the reward? This can be harmful, because it thwarts the human need for autonomy and choice. Or are they positively informational (which is good because it satisfies the human need for competence)?

Also interesting was the discussion of performance-contingent rewards. The article talked of how these can undermine intrinsic motivation, because people have to meet some standard to get the reward. Those who fail to get the maximum reward could interpret this as negative feedback on their competence, which is definitely a demotivator. I find it interesting to think about when considering how to motivate users to meet a certain level of achievement or participation within an online community. You want them to do their best, but in things like contests or selecting those to receive special rewards like becoming moderators or holding community positions, there can only be so many who get the reward. How do you not 'turn off' the others, letting them know that their contribution is valuable too?

Finally, an unrelated note from the discussion session - "deadlines, evaluations, and imposed goals have been found to undermine intrinsic motivation, while choice and acknowledgement of feelings increase it." (p. 658) This is helpful to know for a community working toward a goal, like an open-source community. Freedom from deadlines and constrictions on your work is important to make you want to keep contributing.

So people value their autonomy and social comparisons that emphasize competence can increase intrinsic motivation. But watch out for designs that give performance-based and task-contingent rewards because "the failure to get the maximum reward may be experienced as negative feedback and could be highly detrimental because the reward structure is not only controlling but also conveys negative-competence information." (p657)

I'll try not to repeat what other people have said so well about why unexpected rewards help increase intrinsic motivation and tangible rewards tend to decrease autonomy and thus intrinsic motivation. However, this article didn't touch on what happens when people want to be controlled. Does the appeal of task-contingent rewards and performance-based rewards change? People may want to cede control when they're accountable for their actions and/or they lack information.

Overall, this was a frustrating read. It's hard to design rewards that will excite people and increase their intrinsic motivation. Task non-contingent rewards as a category aren't detrimental, but the authors note their limited scope makes "their potential use quite limited." (p656) Unexpected rewards would help increase intrinsic motivation for people who already engaged in an activity. They can't be used as an incentive to sign up. However, giving people choice in how they complete a task should increase intrinsic motivation.

X Prize foundation, manages competitions for public good, that have a large prize money. Two famous X Prizes are - the Ansari X Prize to build a suborbital spaceflight and Google Lunar Prize. Netflix separately announced a competition with million dollar prize for improving its recommender system by at least 10%. All these competitions generated a lot of activity in the research circles as well as in popular media. If these competitions continue to succeed, there would be more competitions for solving many problems.

These prizes are a good example of how tangible informational rewards should be administered. For example, in the Netflix competition, there are very few rules. The competition runs from Oct'2006 to Oct'2011, contest is open to anyone. Many teams openly collaborate, share knowledge and even merge together. I think this is a proof that the teams are intrinsically motivated.
Interestingly, the current leader in the Netflix competition is a AT&T research team called BellKor. When Wired magazine asked them how they would split the prize money, if they won. The researcher responded "We got a big prize by learning and interacting with other teams. This is the real prize for us." The researchers are trying to get the reward not for its explicit value, but for the recognition and the intrinsic value in working for the prize. The large prize money has served to be a good advertisement for the competition and also for Netflix service.

We can make a design claim based on how these competitions are administered. A large prize money coupled with a few rules competition encourage intrinsically motivated group problem solving.

In the section on page 657 on verbal rewards, I was struck by the findings of the Kast and Conner (1988) finding that....

"there is a tendency for verbal rewards to be experienced more controllingly by female participants than by male participants, which has led to decrements in intrinsic motivation for female participants, even when there are increments for male participants (657)."

Whereas I completely identified with the theory on female aversion towards incentives involving "blowing things up" put forth in Malone, this finding caught me off guard, both in terms of what the implications are and how these findings might be applied in an online community...

I think attempting to have different "gendered" responses to community members is a tricky thing to manage without running into the potential that users might feel stereotyped or marginalized by differential treatment. If me and a male friend were members of the same online community, and I heard he was receiving a different type of recognition or incentive, I might be a little offended by that...

Another big-picture point from the piece that stuck out to me was this finding:

"the rewards issue is merely a special case of a more general issue, namely, the control versus self-determination of human behavior in social contexts. (658)"

I think that if the incentives scheme for motivating users in an online communhity being used is too explicit and transparent, you risk alienating users that find the blatancy and lack of spontaneity in that approach unattractive....

Clearly, its impossible to cater to everyone's aesthetic prefernces, but I think this concept explains why unanticipated recognition and rewards are more compelling. Others have discussed this concept well above, so I won't go into detail, but I echo the notion that this is a powerful way to recognize both your user's achievements and their intelligence at the same time.

Lisa McLaughlin

There are some general design guidelines we can glean from the reading while designing an incentive system:
We know that Underlying intrinsic motivations are the psychological needs for autonomy and competence (Cognitive Evaluation Theory) so the effects of a reward depend on how they affect self determination and perceived competence.

So when designing an incentive system, the Question to ask yourself as a designer is :
How does my incentive system affect self determination and perceived competence
There are two vectors of opportunities now:

1. Can we design incentives to improve self determination and perceived competence
2. Irrespective of incentives can we design interactions that positively affect self determination and perceived competence ?

I'll take a shot at a design claim:
Encouraging Feedback about incremental positive progress towards a goal can improve motivation.

( or presenting feedback as a task contingent reward may hinder motivation)

For example suppose in a community a person needs 'n' number of posts to reach a status (say expert).

if he reaches n-x posts we can:

1. provide no feedback on where he is in relation to his goal (an expert)

2. provide a feedback like : You need to complete x more posts to be an expert
(task completion contingent reward)

3. Provide a feedback like: Not bad! Only 3% people have reached n-x posts in the first two months of being members. Keep up the great work because with x more posts you'll be an expert

 
The first provides no feedback so doesn't boost perceived competence explicitly.
The second presents the reward (reaching expert) contingent on the goal completion thus appearing controlling of behavior.
The third provides positive informational feedback about the performance and the reward.

Which would motivate you most ?

This reading helps me to understand what causes intrinsic motivation, and what would increase or undermine it. Some conclusions (design claims) I found from this readings are:

• Tangible rewards had a significant negative effect on intrinsic motivation, for interesting task, and this effect showed up with participants ranging from preschool to college. (p653)

• Unexpected tangible rewards may be a way to convey appreciation for a task well done without harming intrinsic motivation. (p656) (I am still confused how “unexpected” would be really “unexpected.”)

• Rewards given informationally tend to have less negative (more positive) effect on intrinsic motivation than do those given controllingly. (p656)

• Performance-contingent rewards undermine intrinsic rewards for those who receive less than maximal rewards, since the reward structure is not only controlling but also convey negative-competence information. (p657)

• Verbal rewards had positive effect on intrinsic motivation, but the effect on free-choice behavior was found for college students, not children. (p653)

The history of this subfield seems to follow a conceptual trajectory of complexification:

1. conceptualizing "intrinsic rewards":
2. questioning the effect of extrinsic rewards on intrinsic rewards

"the original finding of the undermining of intrinsic motivation by tangible extrinsic rewards has continued to be the focus of considerable controversy"

3. disaggregating the debate into extrinsic rewards that enhance intrinsic motivation and those that undermine (and , obviously, those that have no effect)

4. disaggregating "rewards" into rewards "for what," with various predictive possibilities
5. noting the influence of context, cues, as well as verbal, attributional, and behavioral effects

The discussion (p653) clarifies the relationships between all of these factors. Defining intrinsic motivation --
"Intrinsic motivation energizes and sustains activities through the
spontaneous satisfactions inherent in effective volitional action."
-- the authors arrive at the conclusion:
"CET has been effective in predicting the impact of extrinsic rewards and other environmental factors on intrinsic motivation"
and
"the conclusion that tangible rewards tend to have a substantially negative effect on intrinsic motivation"

None of this is surprising, but it is nice to see a wide body of literature which supports it. From a political theory standpoint, the key question would be one of the desirability of a society in which people perform activities for external rewards instead of intrinsic ones (i.e. self-selection re: activity). From this question stems the current debate on the transformation of employment and volunteerism (cf. Thomas Malone's Future of Work).

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PHartzog@umich.edu
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The Universe is made up of stories, not atoms.
--Muriel Rukeyser

The main point of this article is that rewards can either control behavior or serve as proof of competence to the performer. The authors explore the idea that people are intrinsically motivated to perform certain activities, and that the addition of extrinsic rewards as a motivator serves to undermine the interest in completing the activity. In other words, there are times when it is not necessary or appropriate to provide a reward for completing an activity; internal motivation is sufficient to complete the task.Psychologists are unable to sufficiently explain why this is, though. Three categories of explanations for this undermining effect are offered.

• "the effects of an event such as a reward depend on how it affects perceived self-determination and perceived competence" (628). Rewards may undermine if they make the subject feel that they are not accomplishing the task on their own.
• Whether rewards are expected affects intrinsic motivation
• The degree to which people feel "interpersonal" pressure to think or perform a task affects their intrinsic motivation (more pressure = less intrinsic motivation)
• Verbal rewards enhance intrinsic motivation
• Rewards that are given contingent on a person completing an activity work to reduce intrinsic motivation. When rewards attribute to the person signals of positive competence, they are less likely to undermine intrinsic motivation

In addition to rewards, the author points out "social ambience" (environment, people, mood, etc) and verbal cues that exist during task completion as being strong motivators in behavior.

I believe Liz was the one that brought up Mahalo last week and how they pay people to create search pages. I couldn't help but think about that when I was reading through the Deci article this week, which obviously ties into the Gneezy article from last week.

An important part of community design is understanding the different motivating elements of the community. My main take away: identifying whether the rewards are extrinsic or intrinsic are essential in designing the correct incentive structure. If members of community have a strong intrinsic motivation, then extrinsic motivations, like cash payments, may not elicit the right type of behavior.

I wonder what wikipedia would look like today if they had relied on extrinsic rewards to induce participation within the community? Would it even have existed beyond the first few months?

Every couple of years, someone in a given discipline gets to write a "what do we know now" article – the vaunted literature review. It would appear in psychology, these often come as meta-analytic reviews within some sub-disciplines (e.g. cognitive, social, etc.)

Obviously, some theories may not stand the test of time when further research shows different outcomes. It was interesting to see how often Deci, et. al used the results of their meta-analysis to cudgel the Eisenberger and Cameron review from a few years previous (1996, I believe) where they advocated the use of performance-contingent and completion-contingent rewards (p. 657). It was academic smackdown in its purest form!

I think that Debra and Nate brought up some interesting discussion about points above. I'm not really sure, though,  where they fit into the reward spectrum. Private points seem like verbal feedback that could help; private points that are tied to public privileges seem like a grey area to me; public points probably would be closer to something tangible (but I'm not sure -- on the site, points seems to be mostly feedback that what I've written is valuable to someone, and that increases my motivation!, Also: as Debra points out, it may also depend on how (un)expected they are), and public (or even private) points that users can redeem for something are probably pretty squarely in the category of tangible rewards, but I think that these are probably all debatable (and testable).

Motivational factors for an individual would depend on certain
variables. Some of these variables could be 1) Age 2) Social setting 3)
eCommunity type 4) Objectives 

 1) Age: Tangible rewards could be more motivational for different age groups (in collaboration with social settings)

2) Social Setting: Differnet societies in the world look at trangible rewards differently.

3) eCommunity type: Difference of motivation between Wikipedia and Mahalo

4) Objectives: Wikipedia users are more driven by the
"not-for-profit" appeal. It would be interesting to see the change in
behavior if there are some tangible awards associated with postings.
Also, would Mahalo users be more motivated if the tangible awards are
removed or increased?

Its hard to say that we can find a perfect algorithm for identifying
the motivational forces for human beings. But can we apply 80-20 rule,
and see if we can find out the motivational factors for 80% users of a
community?