r is to take the thumb tacks out of the box, use a couple of thumb tacks to nail the box to the wall, and then use the inside of the box as a candle-holder. (See the image at the top of this blog post for an illustration.)
Dan Pink – The Surprising Science of Motivation
Dan Pink– author of the bestseller “A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future” and of Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us–makes the case in a Ted.com talk titled “The Surprising Side of Motivation” for rethinking our reliance on external rewards as our motivation.
Pink begins his talk by referring to “the candle problem” explained above. He adds that a scientist named Sam Glucksberg, who is now at Princeton University, conducted an experiment which relied on the candle problem to demonstrate the power of incentives.
Glucksberg gathered his participants and told them that he was going to time them to see how quickly they could solve the candle problem. In addition, he added the following:
- He told one group that he was going to time them to determine how long it typically took people to solve this type of problem.
- When it came to the second group, he offered them a reward: he told them that if they were in the 25% that solved the problem the fastest, they would get $5.00. In addition, the person who was the fastest of all would get $20.00.
It took the second group–that is, the group that was offered the reward–three and a half minutes longer, on average, to solve the problem than it took the first group. This goes against the widely held notion that if you want people to perform, you offer them prizes, bonuses, commissions, and so on as incentives.
An incentive that was supposed to sharpen focus and enhance creativity did just the opposite: it dulled thinking and blocked creativity. And this isn’t an aberration; this experiment has been replicated over, and over, and over again for nearly forty years.
Another Variation on the Candle Problem
Glucksberg later redid the same experiment, except this time, when he presented participants with the box, the box was empty and the thumb tacks were on the table beside it. In other words, he made the problem easier because once the box wasn’t being used as a container it took less mental flexibility to be able to assign a different function to it.
This time, the group that was being rewarded finished the task a lot faster than the other group.
The conclusion we can reach from these findings is that rewards–that is, extrinsic motivation–work well for tasks with a simple set of rules and a clear destination to move toward. Rewards, by their very nature, narrow our focus and concentrate the mind.
But for the real candle problem–the one with the thumb tacks in the box–you don’t want tunnel vision: you want to be able to see what’s on the periphery; you want to be looking around; you want to expand your possibilities.
Main Conclusions Presented by Dan Pink
Pink concludes that routine, rule-based, left-brained work has become fairly easy to outsource and fairly easy to automate. This includes work such as the following.
- Certain kinds of accounting;
- Certain kinds of financial analysis;
- Certain kinds of computer programming, and so on.
Therefore, what really matters are the more right brained, creative, conceptual kinds of abilities, for which “if-then” rewards don’t work.
Here are some more conclusions reached by other researchers studying the effects of extrinsic motivation:
- “As long as the task involved only mechanical skill, bonuses worked as they would be expected: the higher the pay, the better the performance.”
- But once the task called for “even rudimentary cognitive skill”, a larger reward “led to poorer performance”.
- “In eight of the nine tasks we examined across the three experiments, higher incentives led to worse performance.“
- “We find that financial incentives . . . can result in a negative impact on overall performance.” (This is the conclusion reached by the London School of Economics after studying 51 studies of pay-for-performance plans in different companies. 