Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 1976, Vol. 34, No. 1, 92-98 Effects of Externally Imposed Deadlines on Subsequent Intrinsic Motivation Teresa M. Amabile, William Dejong, and Mark R. Lepper Stanford University This experiment was designed to explore the effects of externally imposed deadlines on individuals' task performance and their subsequent interest in the task. In two deadline conditions, subjects were given an explicit time limit for solving a series of initially interesting word games. In one condition, the im- portance of finishing was stated explicitly; in the other condition, the deadline was left implicit. In two control conditions, subjects worked on the puzzles without any explicit time limit. In one condition, subjects were asked to work at their own pace; in the other, they were asked to solve the puzzles as fast as possible. Virtually all subjects finished in the allotted time. Unobtrusive measures of subsequent interest indicated that in the absence of external con- straints, subjects in the deadline conditions were less interested in the game than subjects in the nondeadline conditions. The theoretical implications of these findings for the overjustification hypothesis are discussed. Deadline: a line drawn within or around a prison that a prisoner passes only at the risk of being in- stantly shot. (Webster's Third New International Dictionary of the English Language, 1966, p. 580) Although the word deadline now refers to time rather than space, and the consequences of going beyond the deadline are no longer quite so severe, its connotative meaning has remained largely unchanged. Deadlines are a pervasive fact of life in American society, exerting coercive power over our allocation of time and our expenditure of effort. We not only have an April 15 deadline for filing tax returns but also a time limit for filing forms to request an extension on the original deadline. Although it is generally accepted that dead- lines are often an unavoidable safeguard against procrastination, the external imposi- tion of a deadline may have unintended con- sequences for future task enjoyment. Insofar This research was supported in part by Research Grants MH-24134 from the National Institute of Mental Health and HD-MH-09814 from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development to the third author. We wish to thank Mark Glahn, who helped immeasurably during the pretest phases of this study. We also extend our appreciation to Daryl Bern, Bob Kleck, and Lee Ross for their helpful com- ments on an earlier draft of this paper. Requests for reprints should be sent to Mark R. Lepper, Department of Psychology, Stanford Uni- versity, Stanford, California 94305. as a deadline causes us to see ourselves as extrinsically motivated, we may no longer desire to do something we once enjoyed after we have been forced to do it for the sake of meeting a deadline. In fact, although the immediate energizing effects of deadlines have been documented by researchers interested in productivity (Arved- son, 1974; Webb, Note 1), relatively little at- tention has been given to the long-term con- sequences of deadlines. One such consequence has been studied by Aronson and his col- leagues (Aronson & Gerard, 1967; Aronson & Landy, 1967; Landy, McCuen, & Aronson, 1969). Their research has shown that subjects given either an arbitrarily long or short dead- line for finishing a task will later judge that particular amount of time to be necessary for completion of the task. While these studies raise a number of interesting issues, some of the most important questions about the long- term effects of externally imposed deadlines have been overlooked: How do deadlines affect subjects' subsequent performance, the quality of their work, or their intrinsic interest in the activity at a later time, when external con- straints are no longer present? The present study was designed to test the proposition that, indeed, deadlines may be detrimental to subsequent intrinsic interest. Recently, a growing body of literature has been concerned with this issue of intrinsic 92