The Vast and Endless Sea by Jeff Atwood
Talks about why he enjoys working on StackOverflow, a programming advice forum board, and how he doesn't do it for the money, but because he wants to make the Internet a better place.
It was an amusing read, but wasn't really thinking about it, until I saw the TED talk. Now, watching TED talks is a relatively recent thing for me. First exposed to me from Joses and Jacky, the Technology Entertainment and Design (TED) is a series of seminars (short! The few I've seen are all under 20 minutes) that has all sorts of interesting ideas. (Or, if you don't want to watch the 20 min TED version, there's a 10 min "whiteboard sketch" version by the same presenter that is linked on the blog). I'll quickly summarize the blog entry, but I suggest you read/watch the entry yourself. It is an entry on intrinsic motivation.
What Science knows vs what Business is doing
The speaker, Dan Pink, point to the 'candle problem', where you are given a candle, a box of tacks and a box of matches, and you are to attach the candle to the wall in a way that the wax does not land on the table. The solution is literally outside-the-box. You empty out the box of tacks, put the candle in it, and tack the box to the wall.
Princeton scientist Sam Glucksberg performed a variant of this experiment. He offered people money to solve this problem. Surprisingly, the control group did better. Hmm...
MIT's Dan Ariely did this experiment as well, where they offered several types of experiment (cognitive and mechanical) with rewards. The findings here are the same as Glucksberg. They found that rewards boosted performance only if the actions are mechanical. This makes sense, because rewards focuses the mind on just the task and little else. The subjects performed much worse when cognitive activities are required. It's hard to think outside the box or creatively when your mind is so focused. And just in case there is a cultural influence, they repeated the experiment in a rural town in India. Same results.
This is totally opposite to what the business model suggests, where bonus and raises are given to those with innovation and breakthroughs. Perhaps...really...these innovations occur in spite of the money-based pressures presented by companies?
And so Dan Pink presented his most strongest evidence. Perhaps some of you are old enough to remember a Microsoft digital encyclopedia known as Encarta. I had a copy of Encarta 98. It was pretty good. I did a lot of readings there. Encarta had the input of numerous experts, and is filled with good, professional thoughts, that Microsoft hired. However, this eventually faded as Wikipedia came into the picture. Why would experts and common folks alike put so much time into a volunteer-based, thankless project like Wikipedia?
Because it made the Internet a better place.
Pink noted 3 major concepts that gives someone intrinsic motivation:
- Autonomy - The freedom to pursuit what you want. An example he cites for this is the Twenty Percent Time of Google, where 20% of the Google engineers' time are spent doing whatever they want, to produce whatever innovation they want
- Mastery - People want to be known that they're good at something. Really good at something. Bragging rights, perhaps? Or perhaps this feeds into the third point, which is...
- Purpose - Wanting to reform outdated systems. Make the Internet a better place. To help people. Materialistic comfort. Status and reputation.
I could take this concept and apply it to a various different locations, things that I, or people around me struggle with. Studying for school. Making Bible studies interesting. Staying with new year resolutions. Self-control. The idea is not to appeal with extrinsic motivation. Even PSYCH101 teaches you enough that intrinsic motivation is much more powerful than extrinsic ones. No one can really tell you to study harder, or be more focused. You need to do that. And sometimes it's hard. Sometimes it's really hard. Which is why we were given Help, to do things that we cannot do alone.
Related papers and other links
- S. Glucksberg, The influence of strength of drive on functional fixedness and perceptual recognition (1962). Journal of Experimental Psychology.
- J. Heyman, D. Ariely, Effort for Payment (2004). Psychological Science.
- D. Ariely, A. Bracha, S. Meier. Doing Good or Doing Well? Image Motivation and Monetary Incentives in Behaving Prosocially (2007). Social Science Research Network
- Dan Pink on the Surprising Science of Motivation (TEDGlobal 2009): found here
