Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us: Difference between revisions
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You will never guess what happened. | You will never guess what happened. | ||
It turns out the group incentivised to be greedy capitalist [[Rent-seeking|rent-seekers]] behaved like, well, greedy capitalist rent-seekers. They were disinclined to collaborate, but, ''pace'' {{author Adam Smith}}, the invisible hand did not nonetheless win out. This group forced themselves into a narrow, white-knuckle footrace towards a goal they didn’t well understand and as a consequence they didn’t do very well. | It turns out the group incentivised to be greedy capitalist [[Rent-seeking|rent-seekers]] behaved like, well, greedy capitalist rent-seekers. They were disinclined to collaborate, but, ''pace'' {{author|Adam Smith}}, the invisible hand did not nonetheless win out. This group forced themselves into a narrow, white-knuckle footrace towards a goal they didn’t well understand and as a consequence they didn’t do very well. | ||
The group without the pressure to kill or be killed, who had nothing at stake other than the satisfaction of ''knowing their work might be useful in some later project'' — heart-warming, right? — collaborated unselfishly and, on average, solved the problem much more quickly. | The group without the pressure to kill or be killed, who had nothing at stake other than the satisfaction of ''knowing their work might be useful in some later project'' — heart-warming, right? — collaborated unselfishly and, on average, solved the problem much more quickly. | ||
Revision as of 18:47, 7 September 2020
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The Jolly Contrarian turns cultural critic
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Despite the burgeoning suspicion of popular psych books that are subtitled “The Surprising ~ ”,[1] and despite the truth about what motivates us not being that surprising — I mean, who doesn’t want “autonomy, mastery, and purpose” in love, life and vocation? — Daniel Pink’s Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us is a timely and rewarding book — especially now, in this mad COVID inflexion point, where the world is up-ended, research programmes are in crisis, all bets are off and — who knows? — perhaps this time it might really be different[2] and we might finally be moving to some new sunlit upland paradigm of enlightened employment.
As he does in his TED talk, in Drive, Pink frames his narrative around the psychological experiment: the candle problem challenges participants to figure out how to attach a lighted candle to a wall so that no wax gets on the floor, using only matches and a tray of tacks. Gestalt psychologist Karl Duncker correctly predicted the participants would, through “functional fixedness”, regard the cardboard tray as only a container for the thumbtacks and not otherwise relevant to the problem and would struggler to see a simple solution: tack the tray to the wall, and put the candle on the tray. Solving the problem requires a small amount of lateral thinking, to overcome the “functional fixedness”.
Interesting enough, but it took Sam Glucksberg to make it interesting to people who think investment bankers are poorly incentivised. Glucksberg ran the candle problem with two groups. One group was not offered any incentive but told the experiment was a to test out various problems to decide which to use in a later experiment. The other group were incentivised as folllows: the fellow who solved the problem first would win twenty-five bucks. The top quartile of problem solvers would win $5. The remainder would get a donut. Zippo the hippo.
You will never guess what happened.
It turns out the group incentivised to be greedy capitalist rent-seekers behaved like, well, greedy capitalist rent-seekers. They were disinclined to collaborate, but, pace Adam Smith, the invisible hand did not nonetheless win out. This group forced themselves into a narrow, white-knuckle footrace towards a goal they didn’t well understand and as a consequence they didn’t do very well.
The group without the pressure to kill or be killed, who had nothing at stake other than the satisfaction of knowing their work might be useful in some later project — heart-warming, right? — collaborated unselfishly and, on average, solved the problem much more quickly.
Now, this really ought not to need a Ted Talk to point out. The incentives are all wrong: they discourage collaboration of the sort which obviously will help in solving the problem. The JC likes to keep his glass half-full as you know, readers, but he is a perma-bear about human nature when articulated through the prism of investment banking, all the same. It will take more than the Glucksberg candle problem and the total falsification of the commuter ethos to change things, but we can only hope, and Mr Pink’s book can be our narrative as we do.
See also
References
- ↑ For example, since you ask, Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, Alchemy: The Surprising Power of Ideas that Don't Make Sense, The Dorito Effect: The Surprising New Truth About Food and Flavor, The Surprising Science of Meetings, to name but four.
- ↑ It won’t be.