Non-monetary motivation

[cyu]

Excerpts from http://blogs.hbr.org/bregman/2010/02/a-story-about-motivation.html

Why will five strangers volunteer to help a man they don't know in the pouring rain — and think about the electric lift themselves — while the paid driver sat inside and waited?

The reason the driver didn't help might be precisely because he was paid to.

Dan Ariely, a professor at Duke University, and James Heyman, a professor at the University of St. Thomas, explored this idea.

The task was to drag as many circles as they could within five minutes.

The five dollar group dragged, on average, 159 circles. The fifty cents group dragged 101 circles. And the group that was paid nothing but asked to do it as a favor? They dragged 168 circles.

Another example: The AARP asked some lawyers if they would reduce their fee to $30 an hour to help needy retirees. The lawyers' answer was no. Then AARP had a counterintuitive brainstorm: they asked the lawyers if they would do it for free. The answer was overwhelmingly yes.

When the lawyers were offered $30 an hour their question was "Am I the kind of person who works for $30 an hour?" The answer was clearly no. But when they were asked to do it as a favor? Their new question was "Am I the kind of person who helps people in need?" And then their answer was yes.

[La Comédie Noire]

I wonder what would happen if you paid someone by the amount of circles they put in the square?

[cyu]

I wonder what would happen if you paid someone by the amount of circles they put in the square?

I suspect the more you pay them, the more they'll focus only on the final reward (ie. the money) and the more they'll hate what they are doing - the end result is a bunch of people who are only in it for their money and are miserable at their jobs.

See also:

http://everything2.com/title/Drive%253A+The+Surprising+Truth+About+What+Motivat es+Us

http://everything2.com/title/Punished+by+Rewards

[CartCollector]

I remember that there was one experiment done where people had to do some menial task, and different groups received different payments: one group was paid $20, another paid $1, and another paid nothing at all. The ones who weren't paid anything to do the task enjoyed it the most. The book I read this in argued that this was because of cognitive dissonance- that feeling bored by the task and continuing to do it were opposite each other, and the mind made itself feel that it was enjoying itself to reduce the dissonance between action and feeling.

[cyu]

Excerpts from http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2010-02/ciot-csf022310.php

http://www.eurekalert.org/multimedia/pub/rel/20366_rel.jpg

The human brain is a big believer in equality—and a team of scientists from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland, has become the first to gather the images to prove it.

Specifically, the team found that the reward centers in the human brain respond more strongly when a poor person receives a financial reward than when a rich person does. The surprising thing? This activity pattern holds true even if the brain being looked at is in the rich person's head, rather than the poor person's.

"People who started out poor had a stronger brain reaction to things that gave them money, and essentially no reaction to money going to another person," Camerer says. "By itself, that wasn't too surprising."

What was surprising was the other side of the coin. "In the experiment, people who started out rich had a stronger reaction to other people getting money than to themselves getting money," Camerer explains. "In other words, their brains liked it when others got money more than they liked it when they themselves got money."

"As a psychologist and cognitive neuroscientist who works on reward and motivation, I very much view the brain as a device designed to maximize one's own self interest," says O'Doherty. "The fact that these basic brain structures appear to be so readily modulated in response to rewards obtained by others highlights the idea that even the basic reward structures in the human brain are not purely self-oriented."

Camerer, too, found the results thought provoking. "We economists have a widespread view that most people are basically self-interested, and won't try to help other people," he says. "But if that were true, you wouldn't see these sort of reactions to other people getting money."

[Dave B]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aAFQ5kUHPkY

...

[Kowalski]

IMHO the main non-monetary motivation is direct result of doing smth =)
Why people now need money for work? Because they haven't results of their work. The results belong to the hirer automatically because of private ownership. And working people simply have to get some money as mean of labour time exchange. For gaining at least a little part of common work results. And so they don't see direct tie between these bought results of someone's work - and their own work. So they need some kind of special motivation for working because it's not important for them itself.

But when people working collectively and gain collectively whole result of their common work - so of course this work gets it's own value without any monetary motivation for it. People have no more need for special outside motivation. :thumbup1: It's the real cause of work become a desire instead of obligation, or how may I call it correctly in English... I wish you understand me =)

[Foldered]

Interesting OP. Sort of counters the "fact" that everyone is motivated by prospects of wealth, or that money is the only thing that is important (what capitalism proponents). Unfortunately, measures are taken to make it seem as though money is the only natural motivator out there; this study is interesting as it proves otherwise.