作者：Jamie Madigan

假设现在是20世纪60年代，然后你是卡耐基梅隆大学的一名学生，并参与了一场心理学试验。研究人员向你展示了能够拼凑在一起去创造出更大图形的一些塑料图形。然后他还向你展示了相关图示，并让你对其进行再创作。第一个图形看起来像只鸭子。（或许这个细节并不是真的很重要或者并非真实的，但因为我喜欢鸭子，所以……）该试验人员表示自己对你能在13分钟内创造多少个拼图充满好奇。

在中间阶段，试验人员表示自己会离开几分钟，所以你可以自由地做自己想做的事。你会注意到自己身边放着一堆杂志，甚至还有一本《Playboy》。（游戏邦注：与鸭子不同的是，这一细节就很真实。）你眼前同样还有谜题组块和图示。你会怎么做？在试验再次开始前你会花多少时间去致力于图形拼图？

最终我们发现答案是取决于你是否能够因为拼图而获得收益。

试验人员发现，当他们不能提供任何报酬时，试验对象平均会花费248秒（超过4分钟）的无人监督时间去致力于拼图中。我们可以假设他们创造拼图的动机是内在的—-他们可能是来自于研究团队内部，即这么做的目的是为了活动本身。或者试验对象本身也觉得拼图很有趣。

然后试验人员告诉试验对象他们每创造一个拼图便能从中获得1美元的报酬。这便是一种外在动机。这种情况下实验对象在无人监督时间中平均花费于拼图创造的时间是313秒（超过5分钟）。这可是增加了26%的时间！

在最终拼图创造过程中，试验人员会告诉试验对象他们不会再收到任何报酬，所以每张拼图1美元的奖励消失了。这时候试验对象在自由时间花费于拼图创造的时间便减少到198秒（甚至不到3分钟）。这比提供现金报酬前的248秒甚至减少了20%的时间！

小结：

人们会因为一些内在动机而热衷于解决谜题。

提供外部动机（如现金报酬）能够提高人们解决谜题的数量。

在之后取消外部动机则会导致他们的行动力比一开始更弱。

也就是提供了外部奖励再将其拿走有时候会创造出比一开始什么都不提供更糟糕的结果。这便是心理学家所谓的“过度理由效应”。我们也经常能在电子游戏中看到这样的情况。

让我们以成就，奖杯和徽章为例。这些内容都是外部动机。在Steam或Xbox上打开一个成就是独立于游戏的一种小小奖励。即使你需要在游戏中做些什么才能去获得它们。所以像游戏分数或奖杯比例等系统便会被开启。

我问过内布拉斯加大学的研究人员兼助理教授Michael Hanus这是否是一种合理的立场，而他是这么回答的：

我们可以很肯定地说成就和奖杯都是外部动机。因为它们是你的身外之物。游戏设计师创造了这些东西，而你是游戏玩家，所以游戏是带着目的给予你这些奖励。所以奖励本身便是一种外在动机。如果你能够做这些事，你便能够获得别人所给与你的这种外在奖励。

而关于外在奖励是否会诱发过度理由效应则取决于某些元素。即对象在一开始必须带有内在动机，然后他会开始受到外在奖励并将其置于自己心中最中心的位置。

还有一个重要元素便是，比起信息性，外部动机是否更多的具有操控性。就像游戏是否强调了“如果你未以某一成就为目标你便不是在有效游戏”。这是一种操控性内容，有可能影响到你的内在动机。但如果游戏告诉你“你可以一直做自己的事并能够因此获得成就”，那这便是一种信息性，并能够有效提高你的内在动机。

Hanus是这么说的：

研究人员对于奖励的讨论是将其分解成你可能会想到的两点内容。它们是否会控制我？它们是否能够告诉我该做什么？或者说是它们是否支持我并提供给我像“你现在所做的事是对的。这是你自己真正想要做的事。”等信息。所以在这种情况下你对于奖励的看待方式是取决于你将其当成是内在动机还是外在动机。

游戏构造并呈现成就的方式将决定着该成就是否会影响玩家继续沉浸于游戏中的动机。因为就像上述研究中的研究对象一样，当他们所拥有的外在奖励消失时，玩家续试验或继续玩游戏的动机便会消失。所以从长远角度看来奖杯和成就也有可能创造出不利的效果。

尽管这种情况在其它领域已经得到了广泛研究，但是在游戏或游戏化背景下却是鲜少被提及的。而因为成就，奖杯和徽章在电子游戏中的普及，这变成了值得我们去深思并进行研究的合理假设。

（本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译，拒绝任何不保留版权的转发，如需转载请联系：游戏邦）

The Overjustification Effect and Game Achievements

by Jamie Madigan

Imagine it’s the 1960s. Got it? Okay. You look good in those clothes, actually. Now further imagine that you’re a student at the Carnegie-Mellon University participating in a psychology experiment. The researcher presents you with a small pile of plastic shapes that can be fitted together to make bigger shapes. He then shows you drawings of such forms and asks you to recreate them. The first one looks like a duck. (This detail isn’t really important or even probably true, but I like ducks, so…) The experimenter says he’s interested in how many puzzles you can solve within 13 minute chunks of time.

Around the middle of the session, the experimenter excuses himself form the room, saying he will be back in a few minutes and that you’re free to amuse yourself however you like. You notice that there’s a stack of magazines on the table next to you that includes, weirdly enough, a copy of Playboy. (Unlike the duck thing, this detail actually IS true. I know, right?) There are also still the puzzle pieces and drawings. What do you do? Specifically, how much time do you continue to spend working on the shape puzzles until the experiment resumes?

It turns out that the answer to that depends on whether or not you were being paid to make the shapes.

The experimenters found that when they did not offer payment, subjects spent on average about 248 seconds (over 4 minutes) of their unsupervised time to voluntarily keep working on the puzzles. We can assume that their motivations for solving the puzzles were intrinsic –they was internal to the person and for the sake of the activity itself. Maybe the subjects found the puzzles somewhat fun or interesting.

Then the experimenter told some of the subjects that they’d be paid $1 for every puzzle they solved correctly. This introduced an extrinsic motivator –the cash was external to the mind of the person doing the task. This time during their unsupervised time subjects spent an average of 313 seconds (well over 5 minutes) solving puzzles. A 26% increase!

Now, the kicker. For final puzzle solving session, subjects were told that there was no more money to be had, so the $1 per puzzle reward was retracted. Subjects’ average free time spent on the puzzles plummeted to 198 seconds –not much more than 3 minutes. That’s 20% lower than the 248 seconds spent before cash payments were even brought into the conversation.

The TL;DR version:

People were relatively happy to solve puzzles for free because of intrinsic motivators.

Adding an external motivator (cash payments) increased how many puzzles they solved. Yay!

Subsequently taking that extrinsic motivator away tanked their motivation and reduced their performance to less than it was originally. Boo!

Offering an external reward and then taking it away is sometimes worse than never offering it in the fist place. It’s something psychologists call “the overjustification effect” and it has been found in various other studies as well. What’s more, I think it happens sometimes in video games.

Take achievements, trophies, and badges for example. These are generally considered to be external motivators. Unlocking an achievement on Steam or the Xbox is a little reward that’s generally independent of the game, even if you had to do something in the game to get it. So are systems like gamerscores or percentage of trophies unlocked.

I asked Michael Hanus, a researcher and Assistant Professor at University of Nebraska if this was a reasonable stance to take, and here’s what he said:

It’s pretty safe to say that achievements and trophies are extrinsic motivators. They’re coming from something outside of you. The game designer is making these, you’re playing the game, and the game is giving them to you in terms of goals. And the rewards themselves are extrinsically motivating. If you do this thing, you’ll go and achieve this outside reward given to you by someone else.
(That was part of a larger conversation Hanus and I had about the motivating effects of achievements. Hear the whole thing in that episode of the podcast.)

Whether an external reward will trigger the overjustification effect depends on a few things. The person must be intrinsically motivated to start with, then she must start receiving an external reward that gradually takes center stage in her mind. It also helps if the external reward comes at first as a surprise.

Another factor that’s important is whether the external motivator is seen as controlling and even manipulative rather than simply informational. It matters if a game tells you “Hey you aren’t playing right if you don’t aim for this achievement.” That’s controlling and hurts intrinsic motivation. But if it tells you “Hey, you’ve been doing your thing and that earned you this achievement” that’s informational and should increase intrinsic motivation.

Hanus puts it this way:

The way that [researchers] talk about rewards is that they’re broken up into two things that you think about. Are they controlling me? Are they telling me what to do? Or are they supporting me and giving information that says “Hey, what you’ve been doing is a good job. It’s along the lines of what you already wanted to do internally for your own reasons.” So how you see the reward in that given moment depends on whether you take that as an internal or external motivator.

The way that a game constructs and presents its achievements could have a big impact on whether they actually help or harm a player’s motivation to keep engaging with the game. Because like the subjects in the study above, when the extrinsic motivation goes away (because you got the achievements or you beat the main quest line) a player’s motivation to keep experimenting and noodling with the game –things they loved to do in the beginning– may shrivel up when there are no more external rewards to do so. Trophies and achievements may actually hurt in the long run.

While this has been studied extensively in other contexts it hasn’t really been studied enough in the context of games or gamification. But it seems a very reasonable hypothesis to put to the test given how ubiquitous achievements, trophies, and badges are in video games.(source:gamasutra)