In the early 1990s, a group of economists went to Wolfenschiessen, a small town in central Switzerland. They asked residents a difficult question: Would you accept a nuclear waste facility in your community?

Just over half of the townspeople said yes. Not because they wanted it, necessarily, but because somebody has to host the country's nuclear waste, and they had decided it might as well be them. In their own understanding of the issue, it was a civic duty that just over 50% of them were happy to fulfill.

A short while later, the economists returned to the town and surveyed the residents again - but this time with an offer of money attached to the proposal. They suggested an annual cash compensation per resident, and when the new poll results came in, public support suddenly dropped to 24.6%.

The finding, published by Bruno Frey and Felix Oberholzer-Gee in 1997, is one of the clearest demonstrations of what economists now call motivation crowding theory. The payment didn't add an incentive on top of civic duty. It replaced it. And once there was a price on the table, the question stopped being: What do I owe my country? Instead, it became: Is this a good deal?

The sticker chart effect

This phenomenon isn't unique to civic decisions. It plays out all the time in educational settings. In a famous Stanford University study, researchers Lepper, Greene, and Nisbett (1973) observed preschoolers who already loved drawing with magic markers. One group was promised a certificate for drawing, a second group received the certificate as a surprise, and a third group received nothing.

Weeks later, the researchers watched what the children did during free play, when nobody was offering anything. The kids who had previously been promised the certificate spent about half as much time drawing as the other two groups.

This finding gave rise to the concept of the “overjustification effect" in education. Also sometimes referred to as “the sticker chart effect”, this psychological phenomenon points to the fact external rewards may undermine internal drive.

Designing for intrinsic motivation

This is not an argument that rewards never work. They are great motivators when a task is simple, familiar, and strictly defined. But if a learning program is truly worth building, it's rarely any of those things.

Despite this, traditional learning programs still often design for the routine. They default to simple knowledge transfer, focusing too heavily on what content is covered, rather than how the learner is engaged and transformed. The design question is usually: What should they learn? But the far better questions are:

• How do we build a program that makes people want to participate, and that sticks with them long after the program ends?

• What makes someone want to keep doing this after we stop asking them to?

To answer these important questions, we must look past short-term incentives - such as sticker charts, skills badges, or even financial perks - and examine the mechanics of human motivation.

What drives motivation?

Self-Determination Theory, developed over several decades by psychologists Edward Deci and Richard Ryan, is an enduring theory of human motivation and personality. It suggests that human beings have three innate, universal psychological needs:

• Autonomy: the sense that your actions are your own, not imposed on you. You want to make your own choices; you do not want to feel forced into doing things.

• Competence: the sense that you're getting better at something that matters. You want to build mastery and tackle meaningful challenges.

• Relatedness: the sense that you belong with people who care about this too. You want to forge real connections with a shared community.

When an environment neglects these needs, people rely almost entirely on external pressure to keep moving forward. But when an experience satisfies all three, motivation shifts along a spectrum, moving away from external coercion and towards internal drive: doing an activity "for its inherent satisfaction rather than for some separable consequence" (Deci and Ryan).

• Extrinsic Motivation: Powered by outside incentives such as prizes, grades, or compliments (things you get).

• Intrinsic Motivation: Powered by internal fulfillment such as curiosity, mastery, or personal satisfaction (things you feel).

Daniel Pink’s popular 2009 book Drive proposed a similar triad (autonomy, mastery, purpose) to show why this shift matters so much today. He makes the case that most organisations are still running on a ‘carrot-and-stick’ system that suits routine work and undermines everything else. High performance, he argues, stems from the deeply human desire to direct our own lives, extend our capabilities, and connect to a purpose larger than ourselves. As Pink puts it: "Control leads to compliance; autonomy leads to engagement."

As learning designers, therefore, the ultimate goal shouldn’t be to simply deliver content, but to build an environment that activates internal drive and promotes the development of intrinsic motivation.

So what does a program actually have to do to satisfy those three core needs? Three strands of research offer some practical answers.

Autonomy: design for initiative, not compliance

Educational researcher Reed Larson spent years studying youth development and engagement. His research uncovered a trade-off in how everyday youth activities balance focus with motivation:

• Traditional schoolwork: Typically produces high concentration but low motivation, leading to boredom or low engagement.

• Socializing: Produces high motivation but low concentration.

Larson’s key insight is that structured, collaborative learning programs are rare settings capable of generating both high motivation and high concentration simultaneously. And when concentration and motivation align in a structured environment, the outcome is the development of initiative: the capacity to direct one's own skills and energy toward a goal over time.

Initiative is what autonomy looks like when it becomes durable. A learner with initiative is no longer relying on your program to supply the reason for the work. They have their own reasons, and they care about the outcome of their efforts.

For a practical case study, the Duke of Edinburgh's Award is built almost entirely on this principle. Participants choose their own activities, set their own goals, often work collaboratively in teams, and are assessed against their own starting point rather than against each other. The structure is real and demanding, but the direction comes from the participant.

Competence: stop letting people be passive

Cognitive scientist Michelene Chi argues that building a sense of competence depends on structuring activities so learners can actively experience their own growing capability. She developed the ICAP framework to evaluate cognitive engagement through observable student behaviors:

• Passive: Receiving information without active manipulation (e.g., listening to a lecture, reading a manual). This yields the lowest cognitive impact.

• Active: Manipulating information physically or verbally (e.g., highlighting text, taking verbatim notes).

• Constructive: Generating new knowledge beyond original materials (e.g., concept mapping, summarizing in one's own words).

• Interactive: Collaborating and dialoguing with peers (e.g., debating, co-creating, defending arguments). This yields the highest cognitive impact.

Chi's claim, supported across a wide body of studies, is that these tiers predict learning outcomes. But, interestingly, through the lens of Self-Determination Theory, they also predict motivation levels.

Competence, in Deci and Ryan's sense, isn't the same thing as knowledge. Rather, it's the experience of being effective, and this depends on testing out what you can do and getting feedback on your actions. The passive tier can't supply it. A learner sitting through a good lecture will usually feel like they understand the content, right up to the point that they have to apply it - and then gaps start to appear. It is only when learners move into the Constructive and Interactive tiers in the ICAP Framework that they are forced to synthesize ideas, solve problems, and defend their reasoning. It is experiencing those learning breakthroughs that gives learners proof that they are actually getting better at something that matters.

The design implication is clear: interactive work is not the thing you should "sprinkle in" to break up the lecture. It is the baseline you should be building the program around, where everything else serves as scaffolding for this deeper form of learner engagement.

Relatedness: connect the work beyond the room

Standard educational experiences are frequently siloed: learners complete a specific task for a specific assessment, isolated from outside contexts. But to satisfy the psychological need for relatedness, learning programs can use what educational researcher Randi Engle calls Expansive Framing.

Expansive Framing deliberately pushes learners to make intellectual connections with people, places, topics and times outside the immediate boundaries of the activity or classroom. When learning is framed in this broader way, students begin to see themselves not as passive participants completing assignments for a grade, but as active contributors to an ongoing, real-world intellectual conversation.

This shift satisfies the need for relatedness because the learner feels they belong to a broader community of people who care about solving real problems, rather than just an isolated individual working through a syllabus. Expansive Framing gives the work value beyond a narrow score, making the effort feel worth sustaining. Rather than treating an assignment as a closed exercise meant solely for an instructor's gradebook, students see how their work connects to actual practice - whether that means practicing the real-world skills of their future career, or discovering new ways to have an impact in their community.

A great example of expansive framing comes from the SEA-PHAGES program, developed by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI). In this undergraduate research course, first-year students isolate, sequence, and analyze undiscovered bacteriophages from local soil samples. Rather than performing routine lab exercises in search of ‘yes or no’ answers, students name the new viruses they discover and submit their annotated sequences to GenBank, sometimes becoming co-authors on peer-reviewed scientific papers. By framing introductory biology as active contribution to global genomic research, the program transforms students into members of the scientific community.

Intrinsic motivation checklist

Deep, engaged learning requires pushing past knowledge transfer into interactive collaboration, connecting concepts to the real world, and creating the conditions for intrinsic motivation to develop.

Before launching your next learning program, run your design through these quick reflective questions to ensure you are building for intrinsic motivation:

• Incentive Check: If you removed every certificate, grade and prize tomorrow, what would still keep participants engaged in the program?

• Autonomy: Does the program give learners agency over their goals and methods, or are they following a rigid, step-by-step track? Are you creating space for initiative?

• Competence: Are participants experiencing the Interactive tier of cognitive engagement rather than passively absorbing content?

• Relatedness: Is the learning framed expansively, connecting participants to real-world issues outside the classroom walls?

Content is simply what a program covers. Meeting these three psychological needs is what makes the learning durable. As program designers we should ask ourselves: Are we designing for narrow outcomes, or are we building experiences that help people become engaged and motivated individuals?

At Bon Education, our learning programs are built for intrinsic motivation and founded on the pedagogical foundations of Holistic Safety, Social Connection, Engagement & Fun and Mastery of Content. Please contact us to learn more about how we turn goals and outcomes into meaningful learning experiences.