I had never heard of Daniel Pink until this morning, but the title of his 18 minute talk caught my eye. If it was a TED talk, it was likely to be worth watching, and I'm glad I did.
Pink's talks about what motivates people under different conditions, and he says that in many situations, money or similar rewards make performance worse.
As Pink tells us, we would expect that offering people a greater reward would lead to better, faster performance, but that is wrong. The studies he cites, such as work by the economist Dan Ariely and others, clearly show that offering more money, or even offering any money, can make people do worse at a task. This reminded me of some research by Dan Ariely which shows us that it is sometimes better not to offer people money to do something.
The results of the research are surprising, and Pink makes the point very clearly. What I found most interesting, however, is the more general lesson: we have a lot of ideas that we think are obviously true, so we never test them. Many of those "obviously true" ideas are in fact false. For example, people think that if drugs such as Ya Ba or heroin were legalised that the number of drug addicts would increase, but there are no facts, no evidence at all, to support this.
And just as Pink shows that knowing what really happens is important for making policy decisions, so to should other cases change policy; for example, if legalisation does not lead to an increase in drug use, perhaps all the laws against drugs like cocaine and Yaa Baa are a serious mistake that cause more social harm than they prevent. As Pink points out in his talk, policy should be based on evidence, not unsupported presumptions.
A note on embedding the video: on the right-hand side of the Youtube video there are two links, one is the URL, which I used below in the reference citation, and the other is to embed the video, which I used to insert the YouTube video above so that readers can watch it here. To insert it
- copy the "embed" text from the YouTube page
- in your blog post, go to "Edit HTML" view
- paste in the "embed" text from YouTube where you want the video placed
- return to "Compose" view. The YouTube video will now be visible.
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References
Pink, D. (speaker) & TEDtalksDirector (producer). (2009, August 25). Daniel Pink on the surprising science of motivation. TEDtalksDirector on YouTube. Retrieved August 28, 2009 from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rrkrvAUbU9Y
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