In a piece about losing the desire to shoot I mentioned, almost in passing, that psychology has a name for what happened to me. Several people asked about it, so here is the longer version — because understanding the mechanism is what told me which things to actually change.

It's called the overjustification effect: when you're rewarded for doing something you already wanted to do, the reward can crowd out the wanting.

Two experiments, fifty years old

In 1971, Edward Deci gave college students a spatial puzzle most people find genuinely absorbing, across several sessions. One group was paid per puzzle solved in the middle session. Afterwards, when everyone was left alone with the puzzles and free to do whatever they liked, the students who had been paid spent less of that free time playing with them than the ones who never were.

Two years later, Mark Lepper, David Greene and Richard Nisbett ran the version that became famous. They took 51 preschoolers who already liked drawing with felt-tip pens and split them into three groups: one was promised a certificate for drawing, one got the certificate unexpectedly afterwards, and one got nothing. Weeks later, in free play, the children who had been promised the award drew noticeably less than the other two groups.

The detail that matters is which group was damaged. Not the ones who got a reward — the ones who expected it.

What the effect actually is

The explanation the researchers offered is unnervingly simple. A promised reward gives you an outside reason for something that until then had felt self-chosen. Your mind, reasonably, updates: apparently I do this for the certificate. And once that's your answer, the original reason quietly loses its job.

That's why it isn't a story about greed or weak character. It's a story about where you believe the reason lives — inside you, or outside.

The conditions matter more than the headline

Most articles on this stop at "rewards are bad", which is both wrong and useless. The larger body of evidence — including a 1999 review by Deci, Richard Koestner and Ryan pooling 128 experiments — is more specific, and the specifics are where the practical advice lives.

Expected, tangible rewards do the damage. Money promised in advance for doing the thing is the corrosive case.

Unexpected rewards largely don't. Being paid afterwards, without having worked for the payment, doesn't carry the same cost.

Positive feedback goes the other way entirely. This is the finding I wish I'd known a decade ago: praise and genuine appreciation have been found to increase intrinsic motivation rather than undermine it. Not all external input is a threat. Words behave differently from money.

An honest note on the evidence

I'd rather you trust the rest of this article, so: this is a contested area. Judy Cameron and Robert Eisenberger have argued for years that the undermining effect is narrower and weaker than commonly claimed. Deci, Koestner and Ryan disagreed, at length, with their own meta-analysis. The argument is still live.

What has held up reasonably well is the narrow version: expected, tangible rewards, given for simply doing an activity someone already found interesting, tend to reduce how much they choose to do it later. That's a smaller claim than "money ruins art" — and it's the one that matched my experience exactly.

What this means if you shoot for a living

The useless conclusion is "don't charge". Here's what I think it actually implies.

The problem isn't payment. It's payment becoming the reason. I photographed weddings for years while being paid and loved it. What changed wasn't the invoices; it was the moment I stopped asking whether a date interested me and started asking only whether it was free.

Autonomy is the lever you can actually pull. In this research, rewards do the most harm when they feel controlling. A booking you chose and a slot you filled pay identically and cost you completely differently. If you can only change one thing, change how many of your yeses are real ones.

Let the praise land. Given that positive feedback strengthens motivation, the note a couple sends after the gallery isn't sentimentality to skim past. It's the one external input working in your favour, and most of us are strangely bad at receiving it.

Keep something uncontracted. Run your own no-reward condition. Shoot something with no client, no deliverable and no audience, regularly. It's the only honest test of whether the wanting is gone or just buried.

What I changed

I cut my calendar from about five weddings a month to one or two. I started turning down dates that don't interest me, which took longer to learn than it sounds. And I shoot things nobody will ever pay me for, on purpose, as maintenance.

None of that is a technique. It's an attempt to keep the reason on the inside.

Where the theory stops

A named effect explains a mechanism. It doesn't pay anyone's rent, and I want to be careful not to hand you a psychology paper as though it were an answer.

If you're in a stretch where you have to take every job, take every job. Knowing why it costs you something doesn't remove the cost, but it does tell you what to protect while you get through it — and it stops you reading exhaustion as a personal failing, which is the part that kept me stuck longest.

I ended up writing a book about that, and about what sits underneath it: ego, the persona you build to avoid falling apart, and what's left of the work when you stop using it to prove anything. It's called The Word Became Image, and the opening is free to read on that page.