In order to foster cooperation, it is critical to set up systems that appeal to participants’ intrinsic motivations—that is, what they want to do from within—instead of systems based on monitoring people and rewarding or punishing them according to their behavior. Two facts make this tough to implement. First, intrinsic motivation is in its infancy as an area of inquiry. Second, there is a consistent and stable body of work that tells us that if we add money, things may go worse rather than better. That is, monetary incentives and material rewards can crowd out intrinsic motivations to cooperate or display empathetic behavior. If you are invited to a dinner party, you can bring a gift—flowers, wine, or whatever counts as a friendly gesture. If instead you leave $100 on the table at the end of the meal, you will destroy the atmosphere because you have turned a social interaction into a commercial exchange. This captures the findings of studies in experimental economics and psychology as well as many field studies of the crowding-out phenomenon. For example, a recent study in Sweden, which has a purely voluntary blood donation system, showed that women’s contributions decreased when they were offered payments. Donating blood is a way for people to signal that they are the kind willing to sacrifice for the good of others; offering money spoiled that effect. To test that hypothesis, the experimenters later permitted donors to give the money they would have received to a foundation that works on children’s health issues. Sure enough, the women’s contributions went back up. The Power of Intrinsic Motivation (Located at the end of this article) Whenever you design a policy that relies on monetary rewards, you have to assume that it will have side effects on the psychological, social, and moral dimensions of human motivation. A change that would lead to more behavior of the kind you are rewarding, or less of the kind you are punishing, may cause the exact opposite behavior because the effects on the material self-interest vector will be more than canceled out by the effects on the intrinsic motivation vectors. We shouldn’t try to motivate people only by offering them material payoffs; we should also focus on motivating them socially and intellectually by making cooperation social, autonomous, rewarding, and even—if we can swing it—fun.
The Unselfish Gene – Harvard Business Review
Games, and Games + Education, and Games for Change, all have an interest in human motivation and carryover from in-game to out-of-game situations. This essay,which I found via Imp Kerr, is looking critically at economics and the “rational actor” theory that has held that we most often act in our own self-interest. Recent empirical studies into altruism, across domains, are chipping away at the rational actor theory.