Do incentives work in education? | Big Think

Do incentives work in education?

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Feeling motivated at work feels good, and it's good for business. But employees and managers don't always see eye-to-eye on this very important topic, as behavioral economist Dan Ariely explains. Managers too often associate motivation with efficiency — since their goal is typically to run the company more efficiently — and try to achieve efficiency by automating workflow and prioritizing short-term goals. Those efforts, however, tend to demotivate employees. Managers should encourage workers to use their creative energies, rather than be automatons, and help them set long term goals, which according to Ariely are the real key to motivation and satisfaction.

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DAN ARIELY:

Dan Ariely is the James B Duke Professor of Psychology and Behavioral Economics at Duke University. He is the founder of The Center for Advanced Hindsight and co-founder of BEworks, which helps business leaders apply scientific thinking to their marketing and operational challenges. His books include Predictably Irrational and The Upside of Irrationality, both of which became New York Times best-sellers. as well as The Honest Truth about Dishonesty and his latest, Irrationally Yours.

Ariely publishes widely in the leading scholarly journals in economics, psychology, and business. His work has been featured in a variety of media including The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Boston Globe, Business 2.0, Scientific American, Science and CNN.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Dan Ariely:  So the reality is that businesses are complex. People do lots of things. We need to change lots of things all the time. And everybody is stressed for time. So we start treating things a bit more mechanical. People are automatons and they are producing some gadgets or they’re making some output. And part of it is lack of time, part of it is lack of attention. But there’s a consequence I think we’re really killing the motivation that the people have. I think that this idea that we need to from the company to employees say thank you more frequently. Saying we’ve seen your effort, here’s what you contributed to. Here is your name connected to it is important. The other things we don’t spend enough time on is the commitment of the team members to each other. Again we had this functional view. We’re paying for your time. Come here but we don’t really get people’s minds and souls and so on. And one way to do it is to get the team members. I was in California not too long ago and I was visiting a startup and I asked them how often do they stay after midnight working. And they said quite often and they told me that the night before they stayed until they said after midnight. I said how did it work out? And they said that one of the team members was late on something and she was going to stay until late. And the other team members decided out of camaraderie to stay with her.

And one of the guys said he called his wife and said sorry, I’m going to stay until late. They have two little kids. And he said I have to help Maria finish this. And he said if it was for his project his wife would have been pissed off with him. But because he was helping somebody else it was actually a good thing, right. Now think about what it means. We have this notion of social utility. The fact that we care about the other people around us sometimes more than we care about ourselves is an incredibly important element. And that is about true team spirit where people deeply care about each other and they’re willing to do sacrifices to help other people that they might not do for themselves. And maybe the last thing but the most important one is to understand that as we move more and more to the knowledge economy life and effort and motivation is about goodwill. You know if you worked for me and you did something incredibly basic maybe I don’t care about your goodwill. But as we move to the knowledge economy you can modulate your efforts and attention and care to such a degree that the question is how do I get goodwill. So you can get somebody to sit there and code but how do you get them to truly care, to truly think about the problem. To truly try out, to try and learn something. To basically maybe slow themselves down now because they’re going to learn something later that would help them. To collaborate with other people. How do you get people to really care, to truly have goodwill? And lots of the things...

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