Motivational congruence effect: How reward salience and choice influence motivation and performance
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The effect of performance-contingent reward and choice on motivation and performance continues to be debated. Studies in economics and behavioral psychology consider performance-contingent rewards and choice as two separate motivational mechanisms that reinforce motivation and performance. However, theories on self-determination and motivational crowding predict that performance-contingent rewards negatively interact with choice, reducing its positive effect on motivation. The conceptual and methodological differences between these streams suggest a more nuanced approach that considers factors including reward salience and task type. Building upon attribution theory, we designed and conducted an experiment to test the effect of choice (choice vs. no-choice) and reward (salient, non-salient, and no reward) on overall motivation and performance. Non-salient reward and choice interacted in a positive way, resulting in motivation and performance improvement, what we describe as a "Motivational Congruence Effect." Similarly, salient reward in a no-choice condition had a positive effect on motivation and performance.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it