Extrinsic VS Intrinsic Motivation

All around the world people have become self centered, only bothering about their self interests and personal issues and not about their society. This situation is hardly any different in the context of Singapore.

The government has seen this and has widely used the method of extrinsic motivation to get things done in Singapore. For instance, in Singapore monetary or material rewards are widely used to motivate people to get certain things done. This can be seen in even areas such as child bearing. The government actually offers baby bonuses in order to “motivate” couples to have more children so that the replacement rate in Singapore’s ageing population will increase.

Extrinsic means is also used to deter people from doing certain things in Singapore. This can be seen in the area of crimes where the government imposes hefty fines and punishments to those who commit crimes in order to reduce crime rates in the country.

Although extrinsic motivation has allowed us to achieve many targets, there are negative impacts of using such means on Singaporeans. An extrinsically motivated person will work on a task even when they have little interest in it because of the anticipated satisfaction they will get from some reward. However it focuses people on the reward and not the action. The wide usage of extrinsic motivation would mean that Singaporeans would grow to become robot-like people who would not do anything unless they are given rewards. Stop giving the reward and they will stop the behavior. This may even aggravate to the point where they will demand for larger and larger amounts of incentives to do a certain thing.
Moreover Singaporeans will start losing their morals and we will start seeing less and less people being involved in areas such as social wok where material benefits are minimal.

However I agree with Ismail that intrinsic motivation can subtly in areas such as the collecting of motivation where people still do donate with a little persuasion. This hopefully should be seen more widely in Singapore.