Rewards as demotivators

What if all that we knew about what makes us do things would be partially wrong? What if giving people rewards for what they are doing would actually make them do that thing less, instead of doing it more?
In psychology this is called the overjustification effect.
Here is how it works: - extrinsic motivation and intrinsic motivation are not the same thing. Doing something to get something is not the same thing as doing something because you like doing it. Therefore being too goal-focused (and having the goal as something disconnected from the reality of the activity) might make us enjoy the reality of the activity less, shift our focus from the enjoyment, or make us feel anxious while doing it because we are trying to perform better in order to obtain the reward.

Yet why is it that it seems so normal to us that rewards should make people perform better?
How does one start to understand the genealogy of a cognitive mistake?
This theory might seem intuitive through an association to other theories that work, and a wrong inference that, by analogy, the shape of this problem of motivation should be similar.
The two theories that it might thus be associated to which spring to mind are:
- the theory of the survival drive to satisfy one's own needs - the wrong inference goes like this - > if one has an inherent drive to satisfy one's needs, then promising to satisfy them as a reward if that agent does a certain activity should project the drive to satisfy those needs on the activity the agent has to do in exchange.
        mistake 1 - who says the drive is really projected on the activity at hand? (see second associated theory)
        mistake 2 - given more rewards that could potentially satisfy more needs doesn't mean that a satisfaction point isn't reached, when the agent loses drive for having those needs satisfied
        mistake 3 - drive for obtaining something is not the same thing as the drive needed to sustain an activity in a performant, productive fashion
- pavlovian conditioning - if an object of desire is associated with another object for long enough, the symptoms of desire could appear in the presence of the other object
        mistake 1 - it might work with objects and contexts up to a point, but who is to say that one can transfer desire for an object to desire for performing an activity (by offering that object as a reward for performing the activity)
        mistake 2 - as human psychology is quite complex, it is very hard to say if in the same circumstance, the human won't simply feel inadequate for being unable to get the object himself, offended by having to trade an activity for it, and angry that the other person possessing the reward is making it so hard for him to reach the object of desire - all this resentment is bound to make the human feeling not quite so positive about the activity to do.


It seems we have cognitive blindspots, which we refuse to analyse. We all have the experience of not feeling motivated to do something despite the reward we have been promised, or starting from something that we normally love doing, then spoiling it to regimenting it too much and focusing on rules of doing it, the time it takes us to do it or how to move achieve it much faster, although, thus affecting negatively instead of focusing on the pleasure we get while doing it.
Yet this is cognitively unintuitive - it is trendy to think that if only we could give ourselves more rewards we would probably be more productive, or if only we would raise the stake more, put ourselves in competition, put a more anxious deadline or deal with even more discipline with our own work.
So despite having the experiences that would permit us to learn what motivates us, we stick to the norm of what should be motivating, and fail to formulate our own theories of what is really motivating based on our own experience.
That is why when people like Daniel Pink write a book like Drive, which discusses experimental evidence on what really motivates people, they reach a chord which resonates within all of us. They overthrow trends of thought, and verbalise the cognitive reality shadowed by our blindspots. They give our brain the ability to cognitively process and understand something which was previously hidden, yet completely belongs to us, to the way we function, to our experience.