You probably know that the best motivation to do something
is to really love to do it. The love of
the work itself is called intrinsic
motivation. I know that I get up
each day wanting to come to work because I love my job. I am glad that I get paid to do it, because I
need to make money doing something. But,
my motivation to work hard comes from the enjoyment of the work itself.
That said, there are lots of really boring things out there
that also need to get done. When it is
hard to generate much enthusiasm to do a chore, it can be helpful to have some
kind of extrinsic reward to do
it. Some of these incentives may be
things you choose for yourself (if I clean up my desk, then I’ll go out and get
candy bar). Other incentives may be
provided by other people (if you alphabetize these folders, you will get $5).
A fascinating paper in the January, 2013 issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
by Scott Wiltermuth and Francesca Gino examined a way to improve the
effectiveness of incentives.
Think about a simple situation. Suppose I have a set of items that I need put
in alphabetical order. It will take a
long time to complete the task, so the longer I can get you to work on it, the
better it is for me. One way to get you
to work longer would be to offer more incentives the longer you work. So, if you work for 10 minutes, you can
choose one item from a set, and if you work for 20 minutes, you can choose two
different items. You should certainly
work longer to get two items than to get one.
Now, imagine I group the items available as rewards into two
categories. I tell you that if you work
for 10 minutes, you can get an item from either of the categories you
choose. If you work for 20 minutes, you
can take one item from each category.
Notice, that economically, these two situations are nearly
identical. In fact, if there are some
differences between the items available in each category, you actually have
more flexibility to get the rewards you want if you are offered the chance to
pick two items than if you pick from each category.
Across six studies, though, the researchers demonstrate that
people are much more highly motivated to get one item from each of two
categories than to get two items that are not categorized.
For example, in the first study, participants are asked to
do a boring task in which they have to transcribe text. They will get one prize if they work for 10
minutes and two prizes if they work for 20 minutes. As in the example, I just described, one
group sees the items grouped arbitrarily into two containers. They can choose an item from one container if
they work for 10 minutes and an item from each container if they work for 20
minutes. The other group can select from
among the entire set of items.
In this study, about 35% of participants worked a full 20
minutes when the rewards were categorized into two groups, but only about 10%
worked a full 20 minutes when they could select two prizes from a single
group.
Why does this happen?
The researchers collected evidence that the categories
increase people’s concern that they might miss out on something if they don’t
get a reward from each category. In
several follow-up studies, people were asked to rate whether they felt like
they would be missing out if they did not work the full amount of time. People offered the chance to select from two
categories of items were far more concerned that they would miss out than those
who could select two items from a single group.
The researchers also explored this question in another
way. In two studies, participants were
shown objects that were grouped into two categories or into more than two
categories. In each case, they could
select from one category if they worked for a short period of time and from a
second category if they worked for a longer period of time. When there were only two categories, people
were much more motivated to work the longer period than when there were more
than two categories. That is, when the
situation guaranteed that people were going to miss out on some categories,
they did not feel as motivated to work as when they could get a reward from
every category.
Putting this all together, then, people have a strong desire
to avoid missing out on experiences and rewards. One way that we determine whether we might
miss out on something is to focus on the categories of things around us. Those categories make it easy for us to keep
track of what we are missing. We are
willing to put in extra effort to avoid the possible regret we would feel from
missing out.
Interestingly, the categories in these studies were
completely arbitrary. That means that
the participants were motivated to work harder by a factor that had no real
bearing on the rewards that were actually available to them. Ultimately, this suggests that when you are
working toward a reward, it is worth thinking about what makes that reward
valuable to you.
