THE DEBATE ABOUT REWARDS AND INTRINSIC MOTIVATION - PROTESTS AND ACCUSATIONS DO NOT ALTER THE RESULTS

A prevailing view in education and social psychology is that rewards d ecrease a person's intrinsic motivation. However, our meta-analysis (C ameron & Pierce, 1994) of approximately 100 studies does not support t his position. The only negative effect of reward occurs under a highly restricted set of conditions, circumstances that are easily avoided. These results have not been well received by those who argue that rewa rds produce negative effects under a wide range of conditions. Lepper, Keavney, and Drake (1996), Ryan and Deci (1996), and Kohn (1996) have suggested that the questions asked in our meta-analysis were inapprop riate, that critical studies were excluded, that important negative ef fects were not detected, and that the techniques used in our meta-anal ysis were unsuitable. In this response, we show that the questions we asked are fundamental and that our meta-analytic techniques are approp riate, robust, and statistically correct. In sum, the results and conc lusions of our meta-analysis are not altered by our critics' protests and accusations.