Extrinsic Incentives Bias

The extrinsic incentives bias is an attributional bias in which people tend to attribute other people's behavior, especially their motivation for working or performing a task, more to extrinsic incentives such as pay or reward, while attributing their own equivalent behavior more to intrinsic motivations such as interest or personal values. Because it involves attributing other people's behavior to situational or external causes while attributing one's own behavior to internal, dispositional causes, the bias runs in the opposite direction from the fundamental attribution error, which typically finds the reverse pattern for behavior generally. The management researcher Chip Heath proposed the term, and the bias has been discussed as one possible explanation for why extrinsic incentives applied to a task that was originally intrinsically motivating can sometimes backfire and reduce a person's engagement with that task.