Richard Koestner

Who they are

Koestner studies motivation and how people pursue goals. The 1999 review is the work this site draws on, and it is one side of the longest-running dispute in motivation research.

This page records only what the papers and their published records state. Biography beyond the cited work is not given here.

Key papers

A meta-analytic review of experiments examining the effects of extrinsic rewards on intrinsic motivation (1999), Deci, Koestner and Ryan. Across 128 studies, rewards that were expected and tangible, and given for doing, completing or performing well at a task, reduced how long people chose to keep doing it when the reward was gone. Positive feedback had the opposite effect and increased intrinsic motivation.

Key ideas

The central idea is that the type of reward matters. Feedback that tells people they are doing well supports their sense of competence, while rewards experienced as controlling can crowd out the interest that was already there. Judy Cameron and W. David Pierce read the experimental record differently, and their own analyses found the harm limited to narrower conditions. For marketers, both readings point the same practical way: pay attention to what a reward is paying for.

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