Hello, my name is Lalin Anik, and I'm a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for
Advanced Hindsight at Duke University. Prior to starting my postdoc here, I
received my PhD in marketing, from the Harvard Business School.
My PhD came at the expense of a life long hobby.
I was a swimmer for nearly two decades of my life, which is a majority, majority of
it. And, being a national swimmer meant that
I swam 25 hours a day, 8 days a week. And for such a long time, it's very hard
to be constantly motivated. At the beginning, when I start around age
6, I was motivated by the physical activity.
Later on, when I started competing, it was the adrenaline rush and winning that
got me going. But much later in my career, it was the
mental and aspect of swimming. That I loved, but when I look back two
decades of doing the same activity meant different types of motivation throughout.
To be motivated means to be moved to do something, to be energized towards an
action, and when you think about it. You if, when you think about an 8-year
old doing one task, let's say swimming versus an 18-year old swimming, you need
to provide them with two different motivators.
And, an 18-year old kid will not really be motivated by money, which is the most
common incentive we use. If they win, we can give them a medal,
but if we give them a $100 bill, they, they will not be swimming 5 hours a day,
with that $100 bill. They might be happy, happy at the
beginning, but they'll forget that. And, I see this very similar in life.
We might not be using money, we might, we should not use money with adults for
every type of task. Because, might not, it might not be the
best incentive. This becomes more obvious when we think,
when we start thinking about the past 5 years and the global economic crisis.
Money is scarce and we should start to think about money and incentives in
different ways. I, I think of this as similar to a car
metaphor. So historically, we use cars and we, we
use gasoline to fuel cars. But, as as the population of the world
increases, we're running out of our gas, gasoline reserves.
And as a result, we need to find new, environmentally, healthy, and friendly
sources, fuels. And same with our, with ourselves our
bodies and our souls are vehicles to move towards aims in life and many might not
be money like gas might not be the most sustainable incentive.
We need to find normal ways and psychologically health healthy and more
happiness-friendly fuel for our for our vehicles.
So today, I'm going to talk about incentives, other than money that we can
use to motivate people and their labors. In the first part, I'm going to try to
answer this question, what are some of the incentives, other than money, we can
use to get people going? So, rather than fuel, let's think about
electricity, wind, and water energies. And in the second part, I'm going to ask
this question, can we use these novel types of incentives with every type of
task? Meaning rather than car, shall move
towards hybrids or shall we go back to bicycles, our old ways of moving around?
So, let's start out with thinking about some of the ways some of the incentives
we can use other than money. historically, we have used money to money
to reward individuals, their labors and performances.
And we have actually used individual incentives.
But as humans, we're social animals. We spend 80% of our waking hours in the
company of others. So, why not use this natural social
disposition we have to motivate people. And this way, we can move away from
individual incentives, towards more social incentives.
And what, what is called, in the literature, as social motivation.
What do I mean by social motivation? It means this energy and fuel we get from
the social context of our lives. So with Dan Ariely and our collaborator,
Michael Norton, we partnered up with global giving to, to, to test this power
of social motivation. Global Giving is a non-profit that works
with grass roots projects around the world and that connects them to donors.
And you can, you can go on this website and find a charity of your interest, that
interests you, and donate to this cause. Whether there, these are hungry kids in
Africa or earthquake victims anywhere. And what we did is that we ran a bunch of
experiments online with them. So if you were a participants in these
experiments, you would go online, pick a charity of your choice, and we would tell
you about the behaviors of everyone else who sees this who sees this charity, and
we would give you a percentage. For example, we would tell you, 10% of
people who saw this charity donate to this cause or you would hear 100 percent
of people, everyone who saw this charity, this cause donated.
And what we find is that providing people with this information about other
people's behavior gives them motivation to donate this cause now, as well as
commit to donating in the future. And what we find is that 70% is this key
percentage. This point, where telling you that 70% of
people, not hundred, not everyone, or not 50, but 70% of, if 70% of people donate
to this cause, that you, you are also going to commit to donating today and
also you will sign up to for recurring donations.
Why, why could this be happening? because, it's knowing that, you know, 70%
of people are joining a cause, possibly legitimizes the act.
It tells you that this is a worthy cause and you should, you should also join in
this movement. Let's take another example.
There's this website called kickstarter.com.
It's an American-based crowdfunding website where you can post up a project
that you need funding for and you ask everyone around the world that this is
American-based, so the Americans to donate to this cause.
And, let me give you an example. Let's say that there are two projects.
There are two painters and they both need funding to rent a space, a studio space.
And they need money for paint, for canvas so that they can, they can do their art,
and then, they can have exhibits and possibly make money, let's say from their
art. And when we're visiting these two mm,
causes on Kickstarter website. on, on one project, you see that no, no
one has donated, zero people, in over 2 weeks.
In the other project, you see that, let's say 50 people have supported this
painter. Which project would you donate to?
If you're like most people, you would you would stay away from this cause that was
supported by no one. Because you would think, is this a
legitimate course? Is this worthy of my money?
And why didn't, everybody else, donate? But it, when you see 50 people donating
to this cause, you will want to donate, because there's this element of being a
part of a community. Let's think about another example.
So, Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia. That has open-source open contribution
model. So everyone around the world can sign
come and sign up. And they will contribute information.
with no monetary compensation in return. But why do these people do it?
It's basically for this feeling of being a part of a, a community.
By giving information, sharing information, and contributing to
Wikipedia, we become a part of this group who shares interests and needs.
So it, it drives their behavior. So far, we have talked about social
motivation, and being a part of community as potential incentives other than money,
or besides money, to is to motivate people's labors and contributions.
Let's switch gears quickly and talk about some other motivator.
In this case, money is one currency we can use to motivate people.
Let's think about an alternative currency.
An alternative currency would be time. Just like money, it is they say time is
money. It's a very significant aspect of our
lives, and when it's gone, it's lost forever.
I can, if I lost $10 yesterday, I can probably get it back, but when yesterday
is gone, there's no turning back, I need to move forward.
So rather than giving people money, why, why shouldn't we give them time?
Google got this right they have the 20% time program where they, they tell their
employees that they can spend 20% of their time on projects that are unrelated
to work. 3M did something similar to have a 15%
culture where their employees, employees can spend 15% of their time on
initiatives and projects that are of their own choosing.
Why is this important? By by giving people time, their
employee's time, Google and 3M acknowledge that their employees are
individuals who can, who can control their time and who can have freedom and
autonomy. Autonomy is very important as a
motivator. Best Buy also understood this, because
they have this program where their employees can do whatever they want,
whenever they want it, without any schedules and without any meetings as
long as they get the work done. And the idea here is, again giving their
employees autonomy over their time, and possibly over their happiness.
And this way, people can concentrate during the time that they're actually
working, and then, be more creative and flexible during those 20%, of 15% of our
time, of their time. So these are three of many variables we
can use or incentives we can use besides money to incentivise employees or
incentivise as people and labor in general.
But can we use these incentives in every situation or in every task, every type of
labor, or is there something about certain types of labor that make these
different types of incentives possible so we have a social disposition to be.
We talk about the social disposition as a social motivator.
let's take this to a different type of task and I'm going to give you the
example of Lionel Messi who is arguably the best soccer player in the world and
he plays for Barcelona. If we take him, he's very good at, he's
very good at soccer and if we take him to El Clasico, which is one of the biggest
derbies in the world between Barcelona and Gran Madrid, and we put him in a
stadium of 80 to 100,000 people, he's probably going to perform really well.
And, so will a lot of professional soccer players.
But what if we take Messi and get him into the stadium or in front of 80 or
100,000 people and get him to cook or knit, or play [UNKNOWN] .
This is conditional on the fact that he's not really good at these or he doesn't do
these much. what, how will he perform?
Will he perform at his beyond his base line level?
the poet Zion in 1960;s said that talked about this idea of social facilitation
paradigm and what he said is that having people around, the social presence of
others will motivate us. But he, what he showed is that if the
task is something we're familiar with, having other people around will get us to
do really well on that task, but if the task is null and we're not familiar with
it, getting other people around will will provide an incentive, incentive and that
will rise our adrenaline, but that will also arouse us and that will actually
disable our performance. What I mean by this is the following, if
we take Messi, he's really good at soccer.
So putting and, and he has auto, automatic reactions, he practiced it
well. So putting him in front of 80 or 100,000
people will get will get him to do this task, this task he's familiar with much
better. But if we put it put him in front of that
many people for a task he's not familiar with, curling or knitting, he's probably
not going to perform at the level that he would if he were doing it alone.
So there's this aspect of social facilitation, having other people that
will, that will incentivise our labor, and our behavior.
Finally I would like to talk about a certain type of task that is quite hard
to incentivise and money might not work well in this scenario, and that is
creativity. Creative tasks are are very interesting
very it, they're very hard to incentivise and motivate with in many different ways.
Let's think about this. Possibly, some of you are authors,
painters, sculptors, and writers yourselves, and please think back to the
time where you started this this hobby. It's probably you had a talent you
thought that it's it was enjoyable and it became your favorite pastime.
But as you moved on it life, as years passed and you came to a point where you
needed to make a decision between this task that was intrinsically motivating
for you. And when you looked when you moved away
from your family and you needed to pay for your bill, you probably had to, had
to make a decision whether this task that's intrinsically motivate, motivating
will also pay for your bills. So you came to a fall.
Some of you have quit or put, put this hobby aside.
And, and other people thought that their intrinsic motivation to do it just
overrode the pay that that they were going to receive.
And, this is not, so this, this quandary between money and intrinsic motivation is
not only for, is not only experienced by individuals, but organizations also go
through it and they try to solve it, because they have a lot of employees and
they, if some employees do creative work. So how should employee, how should
organizations motivate their employees to succeed at these creative job, jobs and
be more just be more creative and innovative, innovative?
So, Adam Grant and James Berry ran series of experiments, looking at creativity in
organizations and what kind of motivators should be used to get people to be
creative and they actually approached the US Army.
And they ran, they ran surveys with Security Force officers, asking them
about their job, and asking them how prosocial they are.
This idea of caring about other people, which we, which I talked about previously
about community, in the Wikipedia case, in the charitable donations case, caring
about other people is a main drive. And they looked at that specific drive,
this, and they, they looked at its relation to creative to creativity.
And what they found is that people or security officer, officers who are
intrinsically motivate motivated were more creative, but this but being
intrinsically motivated about a task, a creative task was not enough.
They also needed to be prosocial, they also needed to care about other people,
their supervisors, their subordinates, in order to take that perspective and see
what they would care about in order to be productive and creative at the end.
So, it again comes back to this idea of social motivation that's other than
money, caring about other people, being a part of town, being a part of community,
or just if you are doing some creative job caring about what other people will
think and what other people will need. And as a result, what they found is that
the those security officers who are intrinsically motivated, and also more
were more social and caring about others needs, and were more benevolent had more
access to new ideas. And not only that, that when they had a
bunch of ideas, they were able to pick through them and work more slowly through
these ideas. So today, I talked about two things.
One is I talked about these different incentives we can use other than money,
social motivation, time, and being a part of a community that's get people going,
get people energized. And the second part talked about
different types of tasks, simple versus complex tasks.
tasks we're familiar with versus normal tasks.
And, and that's specifically about creative tasks that that are very
specific to, to, to think about in terms of different kinds of incentives.
So moving forward, well, how shall we, how shall we proceed with these
incentives? And my question there, and this is
something I wonder about is with, with every new generation it seems like we get
everything we want. And, and these, these things that we get
are not dependent even on our labor. they, they might be used as incentives by
our bosses, by our parents, but when we have everything and when a generation has
everything, how can you incentivise them? How can you get them going, and how can
you keep them active for, for labors or for things that they need to do for basic
things? It can be athletic activity, it can be
school homework or it can be just finding a career that they like.
So finally, I would like to part with a quote from a French novelist and
memoirist, George Sand. And she said, work is not man's
punishment. It is his reward, his strength, and his
pleasure. I hope that all your endeavours and all
your work is always pleasure, pleasurable.