Extrinsic Motivation: Definition, Examples, & Psychology

By Charlie Huntington, M.A., Ph.D. Candidate
Extrinsic motivation is our drive to do things that give us external rewards. How much do responses from our environment shape our behavior? Is it a good thing?
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When I first picked up a guitar about 20 years ago, I would like to say that I did so from a place of pure enthusiasm for making music. After all, I had already completed ten years of piano lessons—surely I had a natural and abiding love for music that just compelled me to try a new instrument, right?

​Actually, I was thinking a lot, as a teenager does, about what would look cool to other people. 
I enjoyed playing the piano, but it simply didn’t have the same mystique and draw that being a guitarist did. I imagined that people would want to be around me much more—girls my age, in particular—if I played a cooler instrument. Plus, maybe someday I would get onstage and impress people with my guitar skills.

​I would not have stuck with the guitar for the last 20 years if that was my only motivation. The visions of wooing women and wowing audiences with my improvisational skills largely never panned out; instead, over the years, I have come to appreciate the guitar as a way to express myself creatively. Those external factors matter less and less, and my own desire to be creative has taken over. In other words, I have moved away from extrinsic motivation and toward its opposite, intrinsic motivation.
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What Is Extrinsic Motivation? (A Definition)​

Extrinsic motivation is all of the factors outside ourselves that inspire us to engage in a certain behavior (Ryan & Deci, 2000). In other words, it is unrelated to whether I want to do something for purely personal reasons. Extrinsic motivators are all the life circumstances and interpersonal pressures and tangible rewards that drive us into action. When I first picked up that guitar, I had big visions of being admired by others for what I could do and maybe even building a career as a famous musician. I was driven by how the world would respond to me as a guitarist, not by my inherent, preexisting desire to create music.

An often-used term for this is that extrinsic motivation relates to instrumental goals (Ryan & Deci, 2020). By instrumental, we mean that the behavior is a means to an end, not an end in and of itself. Without seeing the guitar as a means to an end—social status, romantic intrigue, fame and fortune—I would not have picked it up in the first place.

There are several different kinds of extrinsic motivation, according to the psychologists who have done the most work to establish this psychological concept (Ryan & Deci, 2020):

External regulation. In perhaps the most common form of extrinsic motivation, we often behave in a certain way because if we do not, we will get punished or rewarded accordingly. In childhood and adolescence, some of our motivation to complete school assignments comes from the grades we receive; in adulthood, many people work because they want to receive money and, just as importantly, there will be severe negative consequences for their well-being if they do not work.

External regulation as a form of extrinsic motivation is likely happening in your life all the time. Every time you wait at a traffic light, take out the garbage to avoid getting an exasperated reminder that it’s your chore, or take an evening walk to hit your daily steps goal and get a big rewarding message from your fitness app, you are being externally regulated in your behavior.

Introjected regulation. This funny-sounding term refers to when we have started to internalize the extrinsic motivators around us. For example, do you put on deodorant every day? It has probably been a long time since anybody commented on your body odor, and yet if you left the house without having swiped your armpits in the morning, you might feel a sense of shame or anxiety. This is external regulation that occurs without a clear input from your environment, because you have started to carry the extrinsic motivation in your own head.

Identified regulation. In this form of extrinsic motivation, we have come to identify with the external forces that had originally motivated our behaviors. To keep going with the deodorant example, once your thinking about your own body odor has transitioned from “I don’t want people to notice my body odor—that would be embarrassing” to “People know me as good-smelling,” you have become identified with what began as an externally regulating force.
​
Integrated regulation. At this stage of external regulation, the behavior is even more deeply integrated into one’s sense of self. Your motivation to put on deodorant at this stage has gone from avoiding judgment or criticism to thinking, “I am a clean person, and putting on deodorant is one way I keep myself clean.” At this point, it may sound like your motivation has become more internal, but you are still behaving in this way from a place of managing how the outside world responds to you, so the motivation remains somewhat extrinsic.

Opposite of Extrinsic Motivation​

A lot of our motivation would seem to be extrinsic, huh? Yet there are behaviors that are driven by the opposite motivation. The opposite of extrinsic motivation is called intrinsic motivation, and it refers to an entirely internal drive to do something (Deci & Ryan, 2000). Intrinsic motivation is driving our actions when we engage in activities purely for our own enjoyment, to satisfy our own interests, and because the activities hold inherent value for us.

Putting on deodorant each day does not check any of those boxes for me. It is not something I inherently enjoy or find interesting and valuable. It is something I do for other people, even though I have internalized that extrinsic motivation to the point that I willingly and regularly attend to my own hygiene.

By contrast, intrinsic motivation compels us to do activities “for their own sake” (Deci & Ryan, 2000). There is perhaps no better example of intrinsically motivated behavior than when children play, especially on their own. When you set a young child loose in a room full of toys, nobody has to tell them what to do—they just move toward whatever is most interesting in the room and start interacting with it. They’re doing what I do these days when I go to a guitar store: I just pick up whatever instruments look best to me and start playing them. It’s not a performance for anyone, and I, just like any kid who is playing, will simply get up and move along to the next thing when I lose interest in what I was doing.

Intrinsic motivation drives a lot of our hobbies—it is at the core of things we would say are “just fun to do.” I know many long-distance runners, and while some of them are training for a particular race, many head to the mountains for a full day of running just to explore what’s out there and see what they are capable of. For the most part, they don’t push themselves any further than feels inherently good to them.​

Perhaps the defining aspect of this idea of intrinsic motivation is “liking the doing”—some psychologists argue this is what most sets it apart from all other motivators (Locke & Schattke, 2019). When a long-distance runner is focused on reaching a particular goal and no longer enjoying the process, they may be driven more by achievement-related goals than by intrinsic motivation. That said, intrinsic motivation remains a powerful force for creativity and learning; many people continue to learn throughout their lifetimes for no clearer reason than that they feel better when learning or that having new experiences is inherently pleasurable to them.

Why Is Extrinsic Motivation Important?

It is important to understand how extrinsic motivation works because it is both an extremely powerful factor in our lives and a tool or force with some significant limits (Ryan & Deci, 2000). Without extrinsic motivation, we would not do many of the things expected of us, but if we ran entirely on extrinsic motivation, we would get almost no joy out of life.

It is a relatively consistent finding in the psychological literature that incentivizing people to do things with external rewards can actually diminish how much they enjoy the activity (Ryan & Deci, 2000). So while it may be an effective, even crucial, tool to get people engaged in a task, it is often not sustainable. In fact, one study even found that when people are intrinsically motivated to do something, adding in extrinsic motivators like rewards has no additional benefit for their efforts on a task (Robinson et al., 2012).​

Benefits of Extrinsic Motivation

Extrinsic motivation keeps us interacting with other people and our environments in important ways. For example, many of us would not be effective at our jobs without externally regulating factors such as raises, performance reviews, or just knowing that your manager will give you preferential treatment if they like you. In the realm of academia, professors work especially hard at the beginning of their careers because many of them may potentially receive tenure, or a guarantee that they can remain indefinitely in their position (Van den Broeck et al., 2021).
 
To an extent, healthy competition and the desire to outperform others are powerful and effective motivators too. For example, it is a reality of education, whether everybody involved likes it or not, that students are routinely driven by the desire to get good grades, outperform each other, and gain other things, such as a higher-paying job, as a result (Wigfield, 1997). They may be just as driven to study and learn by being around other people who are doing the same thing—this kind of social compliance may not always feel good, but it does keep people on task.
 
And the bigger the potential external rewards, the harder most of us will work (Deci & Ryan, 2000). While we may not persist in a task once we have received the reward, it certainly was an effective incentive to keep us focused and productive along the way.

Examples of Extrinsic Motivation

Extrinsic motivation exists on at least several levels (Vallerand, 2007). For example, some people, for reasons of both brain chemistry and lived experiences, are more naturally driven by external rewards than others. Some of us are more extrinsically motivated in certain domains of our lives than in others, and sometimes situational factors really drive our extrinsic motivation. To give an example, when do I put somebody else’s dish in the sink? It depends on how much I see myself as a clean person, but it also depends on whether there is anybody else around at that moment, whether I am at home or visiting a friend’s house, and whether there will be clear instrumental benefits to me, such as receiving verbal thanks from somebody else.

The Psychology of Extrinsic Motivation​

The concept of extrinsic motivation is central to what is called self-determination theory (Deci & Ryan, 1985), a theory designed to explain how and why we are motivated to do things in our lives. Deci and Ryan (2000) see motivation as ranging from purely extrinsic to purely intrinsic, with many different variables shaping those motivations at any given time. Deci and Ryan do not have strong opinions about whether one kind of motivation is better than the other; instead, they are interested in how the two work together to shape our behavior. Despite evidence that sometimes extrinsic motivation can undermine intrinsic motivation (Deci & Ryan, 2000), it has been argued that both forces are necessary and can even work harmoniously to drive our actions (Covington & Müeller, 2001).

Extrinsic Motivation at Work

Extrinsic motivation is an essential component of keeping employees and employers engaged and on task (Van den Broeck et al., 2021). Interestingly, however, it remains a less effective motivator than intrinsic motivation. It seems that certain kinds of extrinsic motivation, particularly those that involve the employee internalizing the external factors more and more, are more effective motivators than pure external regulation. In other words, while being intrinsically motivated might feel best and be most effective, people also do well at work when they have really identified with their role and its responsibilities, when it feels like an important aspect of who they are (Van den Broeck et al., 2021).

Extrinsic Motivation in Education

The idea of extrinsic motivation has been extensively applied to educational settings (Ryan & Deci, 2020), where it is now well understood that some degree of extrinsic motivation is helpful and even necessary. But to achieve optimal outcomes, educators will want to tap into the intrinsic motivation that each child possesses.

Extrinsic Motivation in Sports

External factors are also a foundational part of people dedicating themselves to sports. Interestingly, one study found that people were driven by extrinsic motivation to get more physically active, but how much they persisted in their physical activities was much more influenced by how much intrinsic motivation they reported for their sport of choice (Buckworth et al., 2007).

Articles Related to Extrinsic Motivation​

​Want to learn more? Check out these articles:

Books Related to Extrinsic Motivation​

If you’d like to keep learning more, here are a few books that you might be interested in.

Final Thoughts on Extrinsic Motivation

Extrinsic motivation is a powerful force in our lives. We simply have to do many things throughout the day that we don’t particularly enjoy, but these things support, sustain, and even build our lives into something better. If you’d like a concise summary of how extrinsic motivation works, I recommend watching this video:

Video: What Is Extrinsic Motivation?​

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