I listen to psychologists on this because they're the people who have done rigorous studies on the issue. Seems like a good reason to listen to them. Why are you railing against this? The data are against you.
Just look around you. People work for money, for sex, for food, for all kinds of external motivators, far more than to fulfill their inner personal happy centers. The fact that some people are miserable because they think they've found their dream job when really it's just another way to pay the bills has other explanations than this weak sauce.
Of course people work for money, for sex, for food, etc. I wasn't saying they don't. What I am saying is that people's intrinsic motivation to do a task is lessened when they're paid to do so. There's a story -- I don't remember where I read it, unfortunately -- that when a group of coders were paid for each bug found, the number of bugs found went up. However, when the bugs-for-pay program ended, the number of bugs found went down. Their intrinsic motivation was lessened when they have extrinsic rewards for doing so -- they no longer looked as hard, or as long for bugs as when their motivation was internal. I don't know why you're calling it "weak sauce"; it's been studied and found to be true. Is there anything beyond "you don't like the idea" that you can cite as reason you think it's false?
I'm also confused why you think your bug story supports your point. Are there lots of developers who derive great personal satisfaction from churning out bug reports? Leaving aside the fact that #bug reports is a shitty metric, they did go up when the reward was introduced. The fact that they went down again after the reward was taken away means absolutely nothing in the context of this conversation, because they weren't internally motivated before.
I think developers do derive personal satisfaction for doing their jobs well, yes. I think that doing your job is an intrinsic motivation.
Bottom line: people do respond to external motivation, all the freaking time, as long as its appropriate to what they're being asked to do. Refusing to be paid to do what you'd be doing anyways, no strings attached, is, plain and simple, irrational. But, in reality, very few people ever get the opportunity to exercise that irrationality, because when someone pays you, there are pretty much always strings attached, and the strings are what are demotivating.
And again, I never argued that people are rational about money, I'm just pointing out that the particular behavior the op talked about was irrational. If you're getting defensive because I'm pointing that out, and you agree that it's irrational, then I don't know what the argument's about.
The fact that studies exist doesn't make their conclusions (or your interpretation of their conclusions) true. The specific studies you brought up in your articles all sounded like they had pretty big flaws, given they were applied to 5 year olds and college kids in contrived situations. If I got a stupid ribbon just for drawing a picture, I'd feel embarrassed and patronized, and of course I wouldn't want to do it again for the same person. That doesn't prove that humans have a weird quirk that responds poorly to external motivators, it just proves they have understandable emotional responses to weird situations. Real life, otoh, provides ample evidence that people respond productively to external motivators all the time.
As for not having a conversation anymore, were we ever? You keep throwing Teh Studies at me, ignoring the reasons I gave for why I don't think they're valid and dinging me for pointing to one that wasn't perfectly applicable to the original situation (even though I was only using it as an example of disagreement with the studies you had brought up, some of which themselves weren't perfectly applicable, either). If you want to pretend like you're the dignified salon member adhering to the rules of civilized discourse, that's fine, but I don't think it's accurate.