Extrinsic Incentives Bias
Extrinsic Incentive Bias
An attributional bias where people attribute relatively more to "extrinsic incentives" (such as monetary reward) than to "intrinsic incentives" (such as learning a new skill) when weighing the motives of others rather than themselves.
Origin
Stanford management scientist Chip Heath coined the term in his 1999 paper "On the Social Psychology of Agency Relationships: Lay Theories of Motivation Overemphasize Extrinsic Incentives." In the simplest experiment Heath reported, MBA students were asked to rank the expected job motivations of Citibank customer service representatives. The order of predicted and actual reported motivations was nearly reversed—pay was rated first by observers but near last by the representatives themselves. The bias represents a counter-example to the fundamental attribution error: while FAE predicts dispositional attributions for others, the extrinsic incentives bias predicts situational (monetary) motivations for others.