Below you’ll find the fourth essay I wrote for my MA in Character Education (2022-25). In my previous essay, I explored the idea that rewards might be used to kickstart intrinsic motivation for virtuous behaviours, arguing that the hypothesis was at least theoretically plausible. In this essay, I take a step further – designing an experiment to test that hypothesis. It marks my first proper move beyond philosophy into psychology and empirical methods.
The proposed experiment draws inspiration from Warneken and Tomasello’s (2008) study on the effect of rewards on young children’s helping behaviour. In their study, children who were rewarded for helping were subsequently less likely to help again when no reward was offered, suggesting that extrinsic rewards undermine intrinsic motivation.
But crucially, Warneken and Tomasello excluded from their sample any child who didn’t help during the initial phase – that is, unmotivated children. My proposed study focuses on those children. After an initial screening phase, only unmotivated children would continue to the experimental phase. There, they would either receive a reward for helping or not, and then be observed to see whether helping behaviour persisted when no rewards were offered. If those enticed into helping by a reward are more likely to help again later (without reward), this would offer some support for the hypothesis that rewards might help kickstart intrinsic motivation – a kind of “gateway” into virtuous behaviour.
The proposed experiment raises further questions: Why hasn’t this hypothesis been empirically tested before? Could the same hypothesis be tested in school settings? I would return to both questions in later work [coming soon].