Internalizing External Goals: The Relationship Between Causality Orientations and Digital Badges

Abstract

Abstract. The current study examined environmental contingencies (e.g., badgification) and individual factors (e.g., causality orientation) as a potential avenue for gamification to encourage adoption of issue-relevant behaviors via internalization processes. Drawing on the mini-theories of self-determination theory, we examined whether people’s causality orientation (i.e., autonomy vs. control) determined when different badges (i.e., reward vs. informational) encouraged adoption of issue-relevant behaviors. To examine this, an experiment was conducted with 215 participants using an image annotation task that implicitly addressed the issue of water conservation. The findings indicate that control-oriented people may have internalized the external goal of conserving water when presented with reward badges compared with informational badges. The results show that badgification warrants further examination to account for individual differences in causality orientation.