Knowing you can pay to skip enjoyable activities undermines intrinsic motivation.

Abstract

How providing financial incentives affects intrinsic motivation has been widely studied in various disciplines of social and behavioral sciences. In contrast, this article explores how asking people to pay to skip enjoyable activities affects their intrinsic motivation, as paying money to access more time has increasingly become common and affordable. Four experiments demonstrate that being offered an option to pay to skip an enjoyable activity (e.g., coloring) undermines people's intrinsic motivation, whereby providing such an option makes people enjoy the activity less and reduces their subsequent interest to engage in the activity. The experiments further show that offering pay-to-skip options undermines intrinsic motivation by negatively impacting people's perceptions about the activity's value: When an option to pay to skip is offered, people infer that such an option exists because the activity has low inherent value, which subsequently undermines their enjoyment in it. The final experiment demonstrates potential real-world consequences of offering pay-to-skip options, showing that having an option to pay to skip a prosocial activity undermines people's intrinsic prosocial motivation, prosocial engagement, and their subsequent interest in engaging in prosocial behavior. The article ends with a discussion of the theoretical and practical implications and limitations. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).