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Video: What Really Motivates People (Hint: It’s Not Money)

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The Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA) posted a video recently of a talk author and speaker Daniel Pink gives about motivating other people. To be clear, my writing on this site is mainly about motivating ourselves, which is a different kind of thing, but I’m not against learning about motivating others when the opportunity comes up, especially if we can learn more about motivating ourselves in the process.

Pink’s talk offers some ideas that are pretty surprising if you haven’t run across them yet. One is research that shows people performing worse in tasks that require thinking and creativity when offered especially high monetary rewards than they do when they’re offered more modest monetary rewards. Sounds backwards, doesn’t it? And it’s true that if you offer higher bonuses for digging longer ditches, you’ll probably get longer ditches–yet if you try to offer higher bonuses for coming up with better ideas, you’re likely to be less well off than you started. This appears not to be an isolated finding, either, but rather something that comes up in study after study in psychology, sociology, and economics.

If money isn’t a good motivator for complex behavior, what is? Pink makes the case that it’s three things:

  1. Autonomy. If you get to choose what you’re doing, you become much more engaged and therefore more productive: see my first article on flow for a related phenomenon.
  2. Mastery. We naturally like getting better at things.
  3. Purpose. If our only reason for doing something is getting paid, we’re much less likely to do it well.

Of course, here we’re talking about the effects of bonuses and such: it’s not the same if we’re talking about money for basic living expense. People have to make a living for a start, at which point they can start thinking about satisfying work rather than simply avoiding starvation.

The video illustrates Pink’s talk with entertaining cartoons and a (to me) distracting practice of writing what he just said as quotes in with the cartoons. To view it, click here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc .

Thanks to Lon Prater for the link.

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