Motivation and Economics

I'm not familiar with Clay Shirky, but after this article in Wired, I want to read up on his work. I've heard his name frequently, but this article reminded me of the many many flaws with classical economics - flaws that led me to totally disregard the entire field of economics for many years.

Pink: Which is nonsense. Both of us cite research from University of Rochester psychologist Edward Deci showing that if you give people a contingent reward—as in “if you do this, then you’ll get that”—for something they find interesting, they can become less interested in the task. When Deci took people who enjoyed solving complicated puzzles for fun and began paying them if they did the puzzles, they no longer wanted to play with those puzzles during their free time. And the science is overwhelming that for creative, conceptual tasks, those if-then rewards rarely work and often do harm.

Shirky: You talk about the laws of behavioral physics working differently in practice from what we believe in theory.

Pink: Yes, often these outside motivators can give us less of what we want and more of what we don’t want. Think about that study of Israeli day care centers, which we both write about. When day care centers fined parents for being late to pick up their kids, the result was that more parents ended up coming late. People no longer felt a social obligation to behave well.

The faster we can move beyond outdated ideas of what motivates people to action, the better.