Towards understanding the mechanism through which reward and punishment motivate or demotivate behaviours

ABSTRACT

Persuasive gamified systems are effective tools for motivating behaviour change using various persuasive strategies. In line with the reinforcement theory, some persuasive gamified systems employ reward and punishment in their design to achieve the intended behavioural outcome. Research has argued both in favour and against using these strategies in behaviour change applications due to mixed results with respect to their effectiveness. However, there is a lack knowledge about how interventions using these strategies could motivate or demotivate behaviours. Therefore, this paper explores the mechanism through which Reward and Punishment motivate or demotivate behaviours with respect to their strengths and weaknesses. The results of large-scale exploratory studies (N = 1768) uncover important strengths and weaknesses that could facilitate or hinder the effectiveness of Reward and Punishment at motivating behaviour change. These include their ability to engage users and make behaviour fun, reinforce commitments to goals, and reveal some consequences of bad behaviour. We also compared the perceived effectiveness of reward and punishment quantitatively.

KEYWORDS:

• Gamified systems
• motivation
• demotivation
• persuasive games
• reward
• punishment

Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to the Canadian Government for funding the first author’s research through Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) and Banting fellowship.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 SurveyMonkey: https://www.surveymonkey.com/