3 ms·
The talk claims to be about motivation, but his main piece of evidence only points to a link with spontaneous creativity. If you reran the candle experiment bu
by tc 17y ago
The talk claims to be about motivation, but his main piece of evidence only points to a link with spontaneous creativity. If you reran the candle experiment but gave the participants the problem statement 24 hours in advance, I would wager that the incentivized group would be more motivated to think through the problem the night before.
- aik 17y agoEven if that is so, a majority of work (that requires thought) is progress that results from spontaneous creativity.
- azanar 17y agoIf you reran the candle experiment but gave the participants the problem statement 24 hours in advance, I would wager that the incentivized group would be more motivated to think through the problem the night before. Motivation is a vector, not a scalar. The problem isn't that the people who are incentivized by reward aren't motivated, it is that the motivation they are given makes them behave a different way. In the case of largely creative work, the motivation they are given modifies their behavior in entirely suboptimal ways. It's not just that you motivate people, it is what you motivated them toward.