Sports are activities that we enjoy doing regardless of the reason we're playing them. But when compensations and aids such as tuition reduction, scholarships, and benefits come into play, we might feel like it is more than just an activity.

We thought that because athletes were given scholarships, they would see the sport they play as more of a job than a hobby. This prediction was not supported by our findings. We found no connection between extrinsic motivation in the form of scholarships and the enjoyment of sports.

There should be further research on explaining the process of how people come to dislike something they would usually enjoy due to an extrinsic motivation coming into play.

Previous studies

Studies have shown that extrinsic motivation can negatively affect intrinsic motivation. In simple language, when people perform tasks for the sake of deriving external rather than internal rewards, their internal motivation and enjoyment is diminished. More specifically, a study examined the enjoyment derived from participants, ranging from preschoolers to college students, who engaged in activities like word games or construction puzzles before and after the addition of extrinsic motivations in the form of dollar bills or candy (Deci, Koestner & Ryan, 1999). The study showed that indeed the addition of external rewards decreased the initial levels of free-choice intrinsic motivation that the participants originally derived from the games (Deci, Koestner & Ryan, 1999)