How would you like to be rewarded? Relating the Big-Five personality traits with reward contingency in a cognitive training puzzle game

Rewards in serious games have had a long and at times contentious history about their effect on intrinsic motivation, with contradictory findings about whether they are detrimental to intrinsic motivation or not. While recent research suggests that rewards can be beneficial, the effect of reward contingency on motivation is still unclear. The link between player personality and different motivations to play games, and the differing reward preferences arising from the different motivations suggests that personality could moderate the effect of a reward contingency on intrinsic motivation. Knowing this effect could help in better leveraging rewards to make motivating serious games. Two studies, therefore, were conducted to investigate the relationship between personality and reward contingency. In Study 1, 60 participants played a block-matching puzzle game that can train executive functions, with each participant randomly assigned to one of three conditions: performance-contingent rewards, which gave rewards after achieving a specific performance level, task-contingent rewards, which gave rewards simply for completing a task, and no reward condition. Big Five personality traits values of the participants were assessed and related to their intrinsic motivation and performance using a linear regression model. A different combination of the five traits significantly predicted motivation and performance in each condition, with the performance-contingent condition yielding significantly higher enjoyment and performance than the other conditions. The efficacy of the linear model was tested in a follow-up Study 2, where 30 participants played the same puzzle game, with half the participants given performance-contingent rewards, and the other half being assigned a reward contingency that would maximize their intrinsic motivation and performance based on the model obtained in Study 1. Enjoyment and competence subscales of intrinsic motivation, and performance, were significantly higher in the group that received a personality-based contingency as compared to the one that always received performance-contingent rewards. The present study highlights the role of personality in moderating the effect of different reward contingencies on motivation and performance, and could explain the contradictory findings of existing research. The results demonstrate that serious games can be made more motivating and performance-oriented by using appropriately chosen reward contingency.