Should You Reward Yourself for Reaching Goals?

Finish the project, book the massage. Hit the savings target, buy the headphones. Run four days this week and Sunday's pastry is earned. The advice to reward yourself for reaching goals is so common it barely registers as advice. Dangle something pleasant past the finish line, the thinking goes, and the pulling power takes care of itself.

Psychologists have poked at that for decades, and the answer is more useful than a yes or a no. Rewards can help, and they can also quietly take apart the motivation they were meant to boost. Which one you get depends on conditions narrow enough to fit on an index card: what kind of reward, whether it was promised in advance, and, strangest of all, whether you liked the task to begin with. It starts at a nursery school table.

The Good Player Award

In 1973, Mark Lepper, David Greene, and Richard Nisbett watched preschoolers during free play, looking for the ones who reached for the crayons on their own. Those children, 51 in the final sample, became the subjects of a classic experiment. The selection matters: every child already liked drawing. The researchers weren't asking whether a reward can create interest, but what it does to interest that's already there.

Each child drew under one of three conditions. One group was told about a certificate, the Good Player Award, and agreed to draw to win it. A second drew with no award mentioned and none given. A third drew with no award mentioned, then got the same certificate as a surprise afterward.

A week or two later, the crayons reappeared, and observers quietly recorded how each child spent their free time. The ones who had agreed to draw for the award now spent 8.59% of it drawing. The ones who got nothing: 16.73%. The ones who got the same award as a surprise: 18.09%.

Two details make this more than a curiosity. The promised-award children didn't stop drawing; they drew about half as much. The reward didn't erase the interest, it eroded it. And the effect reached into the rewarded session itself: those children drew lower-quality pictures, rated 2.18 on a 1-5 scale by judges blind to the groups, against 2.85 and 2.69 for the others.

Then the detail that reframes everything. The award wasn't the problem. The children who got the exact same certificate out of nowhere showed no drop at all. Same certificate, same session; the only difference was the deal beforehand.

When a Prize Rewrites Your Reasons

The researchers called it the overjustification effect. Ask one of these children why they draw and the answer is simple: because it's fun. That's intrinsic motivation, the activity being its own payoff. The deal bolted on a second answer, to get the certificate, and once two explanations compete for the same behavior, the external one tends to win. Drawing stops reading as play and starts reading as work. Take the certificate away and what's left is a job with the salary removed.

Intrinsic motivation is the same engine that long-term goals run on, a distinction we get into in how to stay motivated. The overjustification effect adds a warning label: that engine can be taken apart from the outside, by a well-meaning deal you strike with yourself. Still, one study with 51 preschoolers and a paper certificate is a story, not a law. Does it hold for adults, for money, for goals you care about?

What 128 Experiments Settled

By the late 1990s, Edward Deci, Richard Koestner, and Richard Ryan had gathered 128 experiments into a meta-analysis in Psychological Bulletin, and the relationship came out less a verdict than a map.

The headline confirmed the preschool result. Expected, tangible rewards reliably undermined intrinsic motivation for interesting tasks (d = -0.36 on free-choice behavior, whether people kept choosing the task once the reward was gone). Promise someone a prize for something they already enjoy and on average they do it less unprompted. But the analysis drew lines most retellings skip.

Start with praise, the standout exception. Verbal rewards, praise and positive feedback, enhanced intrinsic motivation (d = 0.33). Praise lands after the fact and carries no deal you were working toward, and it pushed the opposite way from a promised prize. The lift was clear for college students (d = 0.43) but not significant for children (d = 0.11), so more an adult tool than a parenting one. The surprise condition, scaled up, told the preschool story again: unexpected rewards did not undermine motivation (d = 0.01). The undermining only showed up when people did the task to get the reward. The deal does the harm, not the prize.

One caveat before building rules on this. The meta-analysis wasn't the final word, because there isn't one. Eisenberger and Cameron argued in a 1996 American Psychologist paper that the undermining effect is largely a myth; Deci's group replied; the disagreement was real and never resolved. So take the numbers as what 128 studies found, strong evidence with contested edges, not physics.

Reward Yourself for the Boring Stuff

The most useful boundary is the fourth row: the undermining did not extend to boring tasks. Tangible rewards undermined intrinsic motivation for interesting tasks (d = -0.68) but had no significant effect on dull ones (d = 0.18). You can't poison a well that was never sweet. So the tax paperwork, the inbox purge, the meal prep you'd never do for love: bribe yourself freely, attach the pastry, the episode, the purchase.

The other safe zone is celebration. Since unexpected rewards did no harm and praise moved motivation upward, the cleanest way to mark a goal is after the fact and a little off-script. Reaching a milestone and deciding dinner's on you tonight is a different structure from working six weeks for that dinner.

One structure to avoid even on dull tasks: rewards graded on performance, where most people earn less than the maximum, showed the largest undermining of all (d = -0.80), the most detrimental type the authors found. The all-or-nothing challenge, full prize for a perfect streak and nothing for 26 of 30 days, is exactly that.

The Reward You Don't Wait For

So far a reward has been an object waiting past the finish line. In 2017, Kaitlin Woolley and Ayelet Fishbach asked which rewards predict whether people keep going: the ones at the end, or the ones inside the pursuit?

Across five studies, New Year's resolutions, studying, gym workouts, healthy eating, immediate rewards predicted persistence better than delayed ones. The definition carries the weight here. Immediate rewards didn't mean treats; they meant the activity itself being enjoyable, the workout that feels good, the study material that's interesting. The reward is in the doing, not after it.

The resolution study is the sharpest version. Two months in, people stuck with their resolutions more when the pursuit felt enjoyable (β = .31, p = .004). How important the resolution was did not significantly predict persistence (β = .14); importance predicted intentions instead, with delayed rewards predicting expected future persistence at β = .42. Enjoyment predicted what people actually did, and their internal meta-analysis made the gap plain: immediate rewards predicted actual persistence at β = .35, delayed rewards at β = .09. Delayed rewards weren't useless, just far weaker, and they may be what gets you to set the goal at all. People believe the size of the prize will carry them to the finish line; what predicts whether they keep walking is how the walking feels. It's all correlational, so the word is predicted, not caused, but as a bet on which goals survive the next few months, it's well-grounded.

So the move isn't to buy more things. It's to pick the most enjoyable version of the goal that still counts: the gym format you look forward to over the one you dread, the book that brings the subject alive over the doorstop. We've covered two systematic versions, building the reward into the loop in how to build habits, and temptation bundling, pairing what you crave with what you avoid so the pursuit pays in real time. Work you love doesn't need a bribe; on the days it runs dry, what it needs is a system.

The Deal Is the Damage

Back at the nursery school, the unsettling part isn't the 8.59%. Nobody took anything away from those children; they were given a certificate, and the deal attached to it cost them a piece of the reason they drew. So audit one deal you've got running with yourself. Would you do any version of the task without the prize? If no, keep the bribe; it's doing real work on something with nothing to lose. If yes, cancel the deal, keep the celebration, and make the pursuit itself feel better. The goal doesn't need a prize at the end. It needs you still wanting to show up next week.