"Why would you want to do away with money? As it turns out money is too powerful an incentive. When you throw money into the equation, it tends to drown out o

"Why would you want to do away with money? As it turns out money is too powerful an incentive. When you throw money into the equation, it tends to drown out other motivations such altruism, social norms and reputation. Dan Ariely has a wonderful example of this in his book “Predictably Irrational” where he describes how a nursery school tried to use cash penalties to prevent parents from dropping off their kids late. With the cash penalty the number of late drop offs went up (!) because now parents felt like they were paying for a service. The money completely overwhelmed feeling bad for imposing upon the teachers. Amazingly, money was so powerful that even when the school dropped the cash penalties the late drop offs stayed above their initial level." Is it just me or does anyone find something wrong with analysis of the underlying motivations for this para? My read is: The introduction of money changed the dynamics of dropping their kids off late from a moral obligation to a business transaction. It being a business transaction, the penalty now becomes the loss of some money as compared to a hit to your moral standing. For busy parents, they may prefer the monetary loss as compared to feeling like a bad parent. Hence the number of people dropping their kids off late increased. If this could be true, then money may NOT be the that powerful an incentive. In this case, moral reputation/standing is a more powerful incentive. The school should be appealing to that rather than using money as a penalty.