Money is many things
Mar. 31st, 2011 09:07 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pktechgirlbackupPunished by Rewards presents some very compelling evidence that rewards don't make us do tasks better, except for extremely simple tasks we already know to do perfectly. For anything other than assembly line work, incentives discourage creativity and exploration and thus often end up leading to worse outcomes. Sort of like that research showing that men get dumber in the presence of pretty women. I'm willing to accept that premise, but I think what the author ignores is that money determines whether a task gets done at all.
He shows a number of studies where people were either paid to do something or told to do something. Universally, the people who weren't paid performed better and were happier. But that's not a fair comparison, because it's not money vs. nothing, it's money vs. cognitive dissonance, and cognitive dissonance is extremely powerful. So that's great, if you're dealing with students who don't have any choice. But even though I like my job a lot, I wouldn't do it if I wasn't paid. Oh, I'd do things, and some of them would be coding things, but why should I help work generate money for work when they're not generating money for me? Money is the signal that I should be working for them rather than pets.com, because more people want what work produces* more than they wanted the pets.com sock pocket, and way more than they want me being Malcolm Gladwell, however much I might enjoy it. Money isn't everything, of course, and I'll trade some money for better conditions, but if everything paid the same, had the same job security, and had the same working conditions I'd be a scientist. Which would be bad in a global sense, because way more people want the product I work on than want my biology research. Ce la vie. More than that, different people give different levels of value to work. Suppose someone slightly preferred the environment at Google, but was may more valuable to Microsoft. Differential pay is how we make it more enticing to work at Microsoft.
So while I agree with Alfie Kohn that trying to use pay to *incent* better work output, differential pay in response to differential output is still a valuable signal that should not be ignored. One consequence of this may be that people work slightly more to get slightly more money, but the real value comes from the sorting
*All two of you that don't know where I work: I'm paranoid about googlability, but you've heard of it, and it's popular.
He shows a number of studies where people were either paid to do something or told to do something. Universally, the people who weren't paid performed better and were happier. But that's not a fair comparison, because it's not money vs. nothing, it's money vs. cognitive dissonance, and cognitive dissonance is extremely powerful. So that's great, if you're dealing with students who don't have any choice. But even though I like my job a lot, I wouldn't do it if I wasn't paid. Oh, I'd do things, and some of them would be coding things, but why should I help work generate money for work when they're not generating money for me? Money is the signal that I should be working for them rather than pets.com, because more people want what work produces* more than they wanted the pets.com sock pocket, and way more than they want me being Malcolm Gladwell, however much I might enjoy it. Money isn't everything, of course, and I'll trade some money for better conditions, but if everything paid the same, had the same job security, and had the same working conditions I'd be a scientist. Which would be bad in a global sense, because way more people want the product I work on than want my biology research. Ce la vie. More than that, different people give different levels of value to work. Suppose someone slightly preferred the environment at Google, but was may more valuable to Microsoft. Differential pay is how we make it more enticing to work at Microsoft.
So while I agree with Alfie Kohn that trying to use pay to *incent* better work output, differential pay in response to differential output is still a valuable signal that should not be ignored. One consequence of this may be that people work slightly more to get slightly more money, but the real value comes from the sorting
*All two of you that don't know where I work: I'm paranoid about googlability, but you've heard of it, and it's popular.
