Abstract
Negative feedback has been widely reported to be a demotivator that could frustrate the recipient’s need for competence and erode his intrinsic motivation in the same activity. Nevertheless, little attention has been devoted to the intertemporal effect of negative feedback on one’s intrinsic motivation in another activity. To fill this gap, we arranged participants in a game with two sessions and manipulated the content of feedback as a between-subject factor. In session 1, participants had to complete a time estimation task with moderate difficulty, during which half of the participants received normal performance feedback and the other half received negative performance feedback. In session 2, all participants were guided to accomplish a moderately difficult stopwatch task that was competence-supportive. A more pronounced win-loss difference wave of reward positivity (RewP) was detected in the experimental (negative performance feedback) group compared to the control (normal performance feedback) group during session 2. This finding indicates that negative feedback in an activity may have a positive impact on one’s intrinsic motivation in a following competence-supportive activity.
Highlights
Feedback contains competence-related information regarding one’s performance or ability on a task and can be divided into positive feedback and negative feedback by valence
As to the Event-related potentials (ERPs) data, we mainly focused on reward positivity (RewP) and P300, which were demonstrated to be closely related with feedback processing and outcome evaluation (Proudfit, 2015; Muhlberger et al, 2017)
The interaction effect between group and outcome was significant [F(1, 42) = 5.406; p = 0.025; η2 = 0.114], suggesting that the difference wave of RewP was markedly larger in the experimental group (M = 3.671, SD = 0.56) than in the control group (M = 1.791, SD = 0.58)
Summary
Feedback contains competence-related information regarding one’s performance or ability on a task and can be divided into positive feedback and negative feedback by valence. It is suggested that negative feedback commonly has a detrimental effect on emotion (Bernichon et al, 2003), job performance (Kluger and DeNisi, 1996), intrinsic motivation (Jussim et al, 1995), and group cooperation (Peterson and Behfar, 2003) in the same activity. Though the negative effect brought by negative feedback in an activity has been. Negative Feedback and Intrinsic Motivation extensively studied, the influence of negative feedback on a subsequent activity has yet received little attention. Individuals are engaged in multiple activities in a row in many cases (e.g., in the workplace), rendering the cross-activity effect of negative feedback a prominent issue to be addressed. The primary aim of the present study is to investigate the intertemporal effect of negative feedback on the recipient’s intrinsic motivation in a following activity
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