How Rewards kill our Creativity
What if the rewards meant to boost your performance are actually making you worse at solving problems? In a famous psychology experiment, participants who were offered money to solve a creative puzzle took 3.5 minutes longer than those who weren’t paid at all. This counterintuitive finding reveals one of the most important tensions in behavioral design, and in the Octalysis Framework, it’s the clash between Core Drive 4: Ownership & Possession and Core Drive 3: Empowerment of Creativity & Feedback.
⚡ Speed Run Notes
- The over-justification effect is real: paying people for creative work often makes them less creative. The finding has held up across dozens of studies for 50 years. Give a child paint and they'll paint. Give them paint plus a payment for each painting and they'll paint worse. The reward replaces the drive.
- The nuance everyone misses: it is only expected rewards that hurt creativity. Unexpected rewards don't crowd out intrinsic motivation the way expected ones do. That nuance is the entire design opportunity — the same cash given as a surprise bonus does none of the damage the promised-up-front version does.
- Rewards kill creativity by narrowing the search space. A paid task makes the performer optimize for the visible evaluation criteria. An unpaid exploration lets them wander. Creativity lives in the wandering, which makes any reward that narrows the wander function hostile to the creative output.
- The White Hat / Black Hat axis in Octalysis maps directly onto the reward / intrinsic finding. Black Hat drives (CD6, CD7, CD8) are effective short-term and corrosive long-term. White Hat drives (CD1, CD2, CD3, CD4) build the intrinsic motivation the research says we should be protecting. Rewards are a Black Hat tool used where a White Hat tool was needed.
- The deepest move: redesign your reward system so the payment is for showing up, not for the creative output itself. Pay artists a salary and let them make what they want. The research says this produces more creative work than commissioning them per piece. Organizations that cannot stomach this structure are paying a creativity tax they don't realize is itemized in the research.
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Author Credibility: Yu-kai Chou
Yu-kai Chou created the Octalysis Framework after studying gamification since 2003 — years before the term entered mainstream vocabulary. As a Human-Systems Architect & Behavioral Designer, his framework has been applied by LEGO, Microsoft, Porsche, Coca-Cola, Salesforce, and MrBeast, impacting over 1.5 Billion Users.
Chou has taught the Octalysis methodology at Harvard, Stanford, Yale, Tesla, Google, BCG, and IDEO.
His work has been cited by Harvard, Stanford, MIT, Forbes, Wall Street Journal, Wired, US Department of Energy, NIST, NSF, NCBI, US Department of Education, ClinicalTrials.gov, and Google Scholar — with 3,700+ more academic publications. Explore his books here.
How Extrinsic Motivation Kills Our Creativity
(Below is a snippet of Actionable Gamification — Beyond Points, Badges, and Leaderboards. If you like this blog post, you will LOVE the book.)
Core Drive 3: Empowerment of Creativity & Feedback is the golden Core Drive in the Octalysis Framework — the one where people use their creativity and “play.”
The Octalysis Framework. Creative engagement is powered by intrinsic Core Drive 3 (Empowerment of Creativity & Feedback); financial rewards pull on extrinsic Core Drive 4 (Ownership & Possession). This post is about what happens when Core Drive 4 crowds out Core Drive 3.
Often, if you can establish a strong Core Drive 3 element in your experience, it becomes an evergreen mechanic that continuously engages the mind of users without needing to add more content.
Unfortunately, there are many examples where Core Drive 4: Ownership & Possession (in the form of financial rewards) overtakes Core Drive 3: Empowerment of Creativity & Feedback.
There are studies that illustrate how our creative problem-solving skills diminish when we are offered financial rewards.
One of the most famous demonstrations is the “Candle Problem.”
The Candle Problem: Duncker’s Classic Creativity Test
Many of my readers may have seen the Candle Problem in other literature, but if you have not, first take a look at the image below:
Karl Duncker was the notable psychologist who created the Candle Problem in the 1930s. The goal: figure out how to attach a lit candle to a wall using only the tools given, so that the melting wax would not drip on the table.
Glucksberg’s Reward Experiment (1962)
In 1962, psychologist Sam Glucksberg at Princeton University divided participants into two groups to solve this problem.
One group was promised $5 to $20 if they could solve the problem quickly — not bad for a few minutes of work. The other group was simply told that he was having them establish the norms for how long it typically took people to solve the problem.
The original findings were astonishing.
The people who were offered money to solve the problem took on average 3.5 minutes longer than those who weren’t offered money.
Getting paid resulted in the Left Brain Core Drive 4: Ownership & Possession overtaking the Right Brain Core Drive 3: Empowerment of Creativity & Feedback, producing inferior results.
When Rewards Help vs. When They Hurt
Before I present the solution, here’s another image of the same problem, just in another setting.
Extrinsic Rewards enhance focus and increase performance towards straightforward tasks that require less creativity.
If the problem is described using the illustration above, the solution becomes more obvious. With this version, the people who were offered rewards did solve the problem slightly faster than those who weren’t.
This is the key insight from Octalysis: extrinsic rewards (Core Drive 4) boost performance on mechanical tasks but undermine performance on creative tasks where Core Drive 3 is needed.
The Solution Revealed
If you haven’t solved the problem yet, don’t worry. You’re in a “reading” mode and less likely to be intensively focused on problem-solving. The solution is below:
The way to solve the problem is to think “outside the box” and actually use the unassuming box itself.
When a person is trying to solve the problem for free, the activity resembles play. The mind searches for new, creative ways to do things.
This makes the right solution easier to find because the mind is flexible and dynamic.
In contrast, when a person is offered a reward, the situation immediately becomes one devoid of play.
Unless clear, simple directions are laid out for the person, performance will actually decrease because the mind is fixated on completing the assignment.
FAQ: Rewards and Creativity
Do rewards always kill creativity?
No. Rewards hurt performance on tasks requiring creative insight (like the Candle Problem with tacks inside the box), but they actually help performance on straightforward, mechanical tasks. The key is whether the task requires Core Drive 3 (creative thinking) or can be solved with simple focus.
What is the Candle Problem in psychology?
The Candle Problem is a cognitive performance test created by psychologist Karl Duncker in the 1930s. Participants must attach a candle to a wall so wax doesn’t drip on the table, using only a box of thumbtacks and matches. The solution requires overcoming “functional fixedness”: seeing the box as a shelf, not just a container.
How does this apply to gamification design?
In the Octalysis Framework, this illustrates why Left Brain (extrinsic) Core Drives like rewards and points can suppress Right Brain (intrinsic) Core Drives like creativity and curiosity. Effective gamification design balances both sides.
Related Reading
- The Octalysis Framework for Gamification & Behavioral Design
- Left Brain (Extrinsic) vs Right Brain (Intrinsic) Core Drives
- Core Drive 3: Empowerment of Creativity & Feedback
- Core Drive 4: Ownership & Possession
- What is Gamification? Definition, Examples & Framework
- Actionable Gamification: Beyond Points, Badges & Leaderboards
- Self-Determination Theory: Guide to Ryan & Deci’s Framework