NEED FOR COGNITION AND DESIRE FOR CONTROL AS MODERATORS OF EXTRINSIC REWARD EFFECTS - A PERSON X SITUATION APPROACH TO THE STUDY OF INTRINSIC MOTIVATION

Seventy-four Ss in extrinsic-reward or no-reward conditions completed a brainstorming task and then were left alone with the option to engag e in additional versions of this task. If the Need for Cognition (NFC) Scale taps intrinsic motivation for effort ful cognition (J. T. Cacio ppo & R. E. Petty, 1982), the optional task engagement of high-NFC Ss, but not low-NFC Ss, should be undermined by extrinsic reward. Results confirmed this hypothesis. but regression analyses showed that NFC sc ores' moderation of reward effects was due to their covariation with s cores on J. M. Burger and H. M. Cooper's (1979) Desire for Control Sca le. The data suggest that (a) NFC involves intrinsic motivation for ef fortful cognitive processing, (b) NFC may predict such processing main ly in contexts with minimal extrinsic incentives for processing, and ( c) control motivation may be related causally both to extrinsic underm ining effects and to individual differences in NFC.