CONCEPT
Overjustification Effect
The empirical finding — demonstrated by Lepper,
Greene, and Nisbett in 1973 — that providing external rewards for intrinsically motivated activities reduces subsequent engagement when the reward is removed, and the mechanism through which AI systematically erodes intrinsic motivation by delivering external products without internal processes.
The overjustification effect is the empirically documented phenomenon in which providing an expected external reward for an activity that was previously intrinsically motivating decreases subsequent engagement in that activity when the reward is no longer available. The classic demonstration involved children who enjoyed drawing: children given a certificate for drawing subsequently drew less when the certificate was removed than children who had never been rewarded. The external reward replaced the internal one. The children learned to draw for the prize, and when the prize was gone, the reason to draw went with it. Twenge's framework identifies AI as operating through a structural analogue of the overjustification effect: the student who uses AI to complete an assignment receives the external reward (the completed assignment, the grade, the relief from difficulty) without experiencing the internal reward the assignment was designed to produce (
the satisfaction of figuring something out, the pride of