Do people work better when their motivation stems from reward? If you said yes, sorry, but you’re wrong, as Dan Pink proved in his TED Talk. He provides many specific studies about the answer to this question in his talk. The first was the Candle Test. The candle test is a dilemma where the test taker receives a box of matches, a box of thumb tacks, and a candle. The participant is told they have to attach the candle to a wall so the wax doesn’t drip onto the floor. A Princeton scientist though, manipulates this problem into a study of motivation. He tells the participants about the test and what they have to do, and that they will be timed. To one group he says he is timing them to establish norms, to another group he says he will reward them if they are fast enough. So, what happened? It took the second group three and a half minutes longer than the first. Another example, which most everyone reading this can somewhat relate to, involves Wikipedia. Pink describes two online encyclopedias. One was started by Microsoft and was called Encarta. Professionals were paid to write and edit articles, and managers were instated to make sure the project stayed on budget and was on time. The other encyclopedia was made by people who worked for free to create a professional, factual encyclopedia. This one was called Wikipedia, who has become much more successful then Encarta. I honestly think that few people reading this or watching his Talk have ever heard of Encarta. This shows two opposing ideas of motivation. Encarta represented intrinsic (carrot and stick) motivation. That is, if you do well, you get rewarded, yet if you do bad, bad things happen to you. If the workers of Encarta did well, they get paid. If the workers didn’t do their jobs, they will get fired. This is contrary to extrinsic motivation, which preaches, as Pink says, “Autonomy, mastery, and purpose.” Extrinsic motivation is doing what you want to do because you like doing it, not because you are getting rewards. In the case of Wikipedia vs. Encarta, Wikipedia, the representative of extrinsic motivation, wins. This is complete proof of what Pink is saying, and much more relatable than the candle test. Though his ideas were strong, his techniques were just as good.
Pink was very professional throughout his performance. The first tactic he used was humor, as with all of the other TED Talks I’ve heard. He talked about how he did an awful thing when he was younger; he went to law school. The cool thing was that this humor related to how he said he was giving a case, and that the audience is the jury. So his whole Talk felt much more persuasive, like he was giving the audience the facts to persuade them to his views, just like a trial. This is what made him stand out against the other performences, but the way his ideas relate to many things is also incredible.
His ideas also relate to business. His thought that extrinsic motivation is dominant over intrinsic motivation first relates to the business world. In business, people traditionally award people for doing what they are supposed to be doing. This contradicts with extrinsic motivation, which Pink proved often produces better results. Pink gives the example of a familiar company, Google, where 20% of the engineers spend time working on whatever they want to work on. What Pink says is that about half of Google’s ideas are developed during that time. Think about this. Many of Google's brilliant ideas are developed by people purposefully being off task. His ideas do relate to business, but there could be a whole education change based on his ideas of motivation.
This idea of extrinsic motivation plays into education, too. Students follow the carrot and stick motivation, where if they do well they get A’s, if they do badly, they get worse grades. If these rewards and failure were lifted, what would happen? You might be thinking that good results would come out of this, but I think differently. Many of these results came from people who enjoyed all that they were doing. As I’ve said in other posts, I want to be a chef, not a mathematician or a scientist. If there weren’t grades, I would choose not to attend math class. On the other hand, if I were in a cooking class, I would work better, and come up with new ideas because I wouldn’t be graded on what I’m doing. It seems like intrinsic motivation puts pressure on people, which makes them perform slightly worse. Now, back to how this relates to education. Education could revolve around these two ideas. For classes where kids enjoy, where kids would do even if they weren’t in school, grades should be lessened. Why? Because kids would enjoy what they are doing and produce better results. On the other hand, in classes where students don’t want to be there, kids should actually get rewarded with more than a letter. I don’t know what this reward could be; it could even be individualized to each student. This system revolves all around motivation and I believe that it would be very successful. I’m done talking, so now you, the reader, should watch this video and decide what you think of it.
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