Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us: Difference between revisions

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 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.
+Interesting enough, but it took ''another'' gestalt psychologist, 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 follows: 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-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 so 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.