Overjustification is the worst idea I have come across in my professional career. By definition, overjustification is about giving someone a reward for a behavior or activity they like so much they often do it without reward. Examples include giving a Good Player Award to children who like to draw, or paying college students who like to solve puzzles.
If that were all there is to it, overjustificaion would just be another idea. What got social psychologists excited about overjustification is that they figured it could arouse no negative feelings.
According to social psychologists, overjustification does not arouse negative emotions because it is about adding the fun of the reward to the fun of the enjoyable behavior. Fun + fun cannot be unpleasant, say social psychologists known as self-perception theorists.
I wonder who in the world of social psychology makes this stuff up. Obviously, any time one person offers reward to another, there is the possibility of a variety of negative emotions. These include distraction, evaluation anxiety, frustration waiting for reward, and so on.
The use of grades in schools is an example of how flawed the construct of overjustification is.
In the 1960s Seymour Sarason wrote about the negative psychological effects of test anxiety. Many others have discussed the rat race for grades. Obviously, this is about students perceiving grades as evaluative feedback and becoming anxious about negative evaluations. The emotions are negative.
In the early 1970s a small group of social psychologists argued that people perceive rewards as controlling, not as evaluations. They said they would prove their point by showing that even when rewards arouse no evaluation anxiety, they undermine intrinsic interest in learning. They then studied over-sufficient rewards because, they said, over-sufficient rewards arouse no negative emotions at all.
Long before the social psychologists came on the scene, clinical psychologists and learning theorists had warned that schools use grades in ways that arouse too much evaluation and test anxiety. Then came the overjustification theorists who said that test anxiety and evaluation anxiety aren’t how grades undermine student motivation for learning. Instead, the problem is that the students perceive teachers are using grades to control them. The problem is a lack of self-determination.’
How do they know this? They say they know the problem with grades is perceived control and not anxiety because adding extrinsic rewards such as grades to intrinsic motivation for learning cannot be unpleasant.
The idea that over-sufficient rewards cannot arouse negative feelings is how social psychologists thought they could choose between cognitive dissonance and self-perception theory. It is the single worst idea I can recall coming across in my academic career as a psychologist. It might be valid in a make believe world in which there is no distraction, evaluation anxiety, frustrating delays, etc. It isn’t valid in the real world.