2 Case study 2
2.1 Case study on motivation: Does it arise from outside or inside an individual?
Reward systems are utilized in schools and the workplace, but are rewards operating in the opposite way from what is intended? Do external incentives promote creativity? To address this, researchers investigated whether people would tend to display more creativity when they are thinking about intrinsic or extrinsic motivations Ramsey and Schafer (2013). In this study, undergraduate students of similar creative writing experience were randomly assigned to one of two groups . One group received intrinsic questionnaires, and the other received extrinsic questionnaires.
The intent of this treatment (the questionnaires) was to have students establish a thought pattern concerning a type of motivation (intrinsic – doing something because it is rewarding or enjoyable; extrinsic – doing something because we want to earn a reward or avoid punishment). Researchers speculated that those who were thinking about intrinsic motivations would display more creativity than subjects who were thinking about extrinsic motivations. All subjects were instructed to write a Haiku, and those poems were evaluated for creativity by a panel of judges
The resulting experimental data is shown below, displaying the creativity score (Score) and the type of questionnaires (Treatment) assigned for a given undergraduate. Do the data provide evidence that creativity scores are affected by type of motivation?
Summary of findings
Numerical and graphical summaries of the creativity scores for each motivation type are provided below.
| Treatment | Mean | SD |
|---|---|---|
| Extrinsic | 15.74 | 5.25 |
| Intrinsic | 19.88 | 4.44 |
The creativity scores tended to be lower for the students in the extrinsic group (-4.14 difference in sample means), with both groups showing similar variability in scores. Are the scores between the two groups different enough to convince you that those thinking about intrinsic motivations display more creativity than subjects that were thinking about extrinsic motivations? If not, how much larger should the mean be? Answers to such questions require inferential methods that will be discussed in a future chapter.
The two-sample t-test gives a p-value of approximately .00562, suggesting a difference in mean creativity scores. The 95% CI for intrinsic minus extrinsic mean score is (1.278, 7.011). Thus, the intrinsic group has the higher estimated mean score. These results assume that the observations are independent. A randomization test for this study is discussed in Chapter 11.
Scope of inference
The questionnaires were randomly assigned, which helps us assess whether the type of motivation affected creativity for these students. However, the students were not randomly sampled from a larger population. We should keep this in mind before applying the findings to other students.
Amabile, Teresa M. 1985. “Motivation and Creativity: Effects of Motivational Orientation on Creative Writers.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 48 (2): 393–99. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.48.2.393.
Ramsey, F. L., and D. W. Schafer. 2013. “The Statistical Sleuth: A Course in Methods of Data Analysis.” Cengage Learning 30 (4): 413–14. https://doi.org/10.1080/00224065.1998.11979882.