GAMIFIED SELVES, FRAGILE WORTH

Jan. 18, 2026

The digital environment has normalized a motivational regime long critiqued in educational psychology: reward–punishment conditioning. Decades before social media, Punished by Rewards demonstrated that external incentives — grades, praise, gold stars — undermine intrinsic motivation and degrade the quality of engagement. What the platform economy has done is scale this logic to everyday life. Likes, streaks, badges, and notifications operate as continuous micro-rewards, training attention and behavior while quietly shifting the locus of value from activity to validation. The promise is empowerment; the effect is dependency. Motivation becomes contingent, fragile, and externally indexed.

Empirical research on self-esteem complicates the popular assumption that “more positive feedback” necessarily produces healthier selves. Kohn’s later critique of self-esteem ideology, alongside work by Baumeister and colleagues, showed that inflated or contingent self-esteem does not reliably improve performance or ethical behavior. Instead, it increases defensiveness and volatility when affirmation is withdrawn. In digital contexts, this volatility is intensified: feedback is rapid, public, and numerically quantified. The self is no longer evaluated through reflective judgment but through fluctuating metrics, producing what can be described as situational self-worth — a state highly sensitive to algorithmic signals.

Studies in educational and occupational psychology, including research on teachers’ self-efficacy, show that self-esteem interacts with performance only under specific conditions: when it is supported by competence, autonomy, and meaningful agency. When self-esteem is merely mirrored back through approval cues, it becomes hollow. Gamified systems short-circuit this process. They reward visibility rather than mastery, reaction rather than deliberation. Over time, individuals learn to optimize for feedback rather than for understanding or ethical coherence. This is consistent with findings in motivation research (Deci & Ryan; Hidi & Renninger) showing that controlled motivation erodes deep engagement and long-term resilience.

At the micro-psychological level, the reward–punishment loop alters affect regulation and decision-making. Neurocognitive studies of reinforcement learning and variable-ratio schedules (the same logic used in slot machines) indicate heightened anticipatory arousal followed by rapid emotional decay. In social media, this translates into compulsive checking, fear of omission, and attentional fragmentation. Self-esteem becomes tethered to prediction errors: unexpected likes briefly elevate mood; their absence generates disproportionate self-doubt. The subject is not simply seeking pleasure, but reassurance of existence within a competitive field of visibility.

THE MENTAL FORECAST is not one of overt pathology alone, but of normalization: a culture where self-esteem is continuously negotiated with machines, and where worth is experienced as something granted rather than constructed. Gamification does not merely motivate behavior; it reorganizes the self around external legibility. The long-term risk is a population skilled in self-presentation but weakened in autonomy, ethical grounding, and intrinsic purpose. As earlier critics of reward-based systems warned, a society that governs through incentives eventually produces compliance without commitment — and selves that perform constantly, yet feel increasingly unreal.

Liviu Poenaru

REFERENCES

Kohn, A. (1993). Punished by rewards: The trouble with gold stars, incentive plans, A’s, praise, and other bribes. Houghton Mifflin.

Kohn, A. (1994). The truth about self-esteem. Phi Delta Kappan, 76(4), 272–283.

Baumeister, R. F., Campbell, J. D., Krueger, J. I., & Vohs, K. D. (2003). Does high self-esteem cause better performance, interpersonal success, happiness, or healthier lifestyles? Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 4(1), 1–44. https://doi.org/10.1111/1529-1006.01431

Deci, E. L., Koestner, R., & Ryan, R. M. (1999). A meta-analytic review of experiments examining the effects of extrinsic rewards on intrinsic motivation. Psychological Bulletin, 125(6), 627–668. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.125.6.627

Khan, A., Fleva, E., & Qazi, T. (2015). Role of self-esteem and general self-efficacy in teachers’ efficacy in primary schools. Psychology, 6(1), 117–125. https://doi.org/10.4236/psych.2015.61010 (SCIRP)