RSA Animate – Drive: The Surprising
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are motivations are unbelievably interesting i mean it i’d find about her
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work in this for a few years i just find the top still so amazingly engaging
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and interested so i won’t tell you about that
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scientist really surprising
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the science is a little bit freaky
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we are not as endlessly manipulative or and as predictable as you would think
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there’s a whole set up
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unbelievably interesting stories i want to give you two
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the call into question this idea that if you were bored something you get more
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the behavior you want
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to punish something you get left foot left talk
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let’s go from
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london to the mean streets of cambridge massachusetts
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the northeastern part a united states let’s talk about a study done at m_i_t_
0:55
massachusetts institute of technology
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here’s what they do the typical whole group of students and they gave me a set
1:00
of challenges things like tom
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memorizing strings of digits
1:04
uh… stopping word puzzles other kinds of spatial puzzles even physical tasks
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like throwing a ball
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at the gate at least challenges and they said
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to incentivize their performance
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they gave me three levels of rewards
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so if you did pretty well you got a small monitor reward if you didn’t
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medium well you get a medium monetary or
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and if you did really well if you were one of top reformers you’ve got a barge
1:27
calf
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we’ve seen this movie before this is centrally typical motivation scheme
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within organizations right
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we worked very
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top performers we nor the local formers and adult books come in the middle of k
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it a little bit
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so what happens
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they didn’t ask to have these incentives here’s what they found out
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as long as the copy about only mechanical you know
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bonuses work as they would be expected the higher the pay the vendor
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performance
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faith that make sense but here’s what happens
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but once the task offer even rudimentary cognitive skill
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a larger reward led to poorer performance
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now this is strange right on larger reward but the poor performance how can
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that possibly be
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now with interesting about this is that these folks here who who who did this
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are all economist at that through at m_i_t_ one of the university of chicago
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one at carnegie mellon ok topsy-turvy economics professor and they’re reaching
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this conclusion that seems
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contrary to what a lot of us learned in economics
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which is which is that the higher the reward the better performance than they
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are saying that once you get above rudimentary cognitive skill
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if the other way around
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which seems like this kind of the idea that these rewards the work that way
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seems vaguely left-wing in socialist doesn’t it
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uh… this kind of weird
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for those of you have those conspiracy theories i want to point out the so
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notoriously left-wing socialist group that financed the research
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bedroom their back
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driven as the mainstream of the mainstream coming to a conclusion that’s
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quite
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surprise it seems to defy the law of the vehicle physics
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there was a stranger straight funny so what i did it said lets this is this is
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freaky
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let’s go tested somewhere else maybe that
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fifty dollars a sixty dollar price is insufficiently motivated for an m_i_t_
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right
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let’s go to lights were fifty dollars actually
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more significant relative so with that they could spare moved in a good ahmad
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orion india through india where fifty dollars sixty dollars whatever the
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number was is actually significant sum of money city replicate experiment india
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roughly as follows smaller awards
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equivalent to accelerate
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answers the small performance slow performance to accelerate
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media performance about a month salary
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uh…
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high performance but two months aller
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as it is a real good incentives but this is going to get a different
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result here
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what happened though was that the people offered the medium reward
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you’d know better than the people often small report
4:01
but this time around people offered proper work
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they did worst of all higher incentives what the worst performance with
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interesting about this is that it actually isn’t all that anomalous this
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has been replicated over and over and over again by psychologist
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by uh…
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six and by sociologist
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uh… and bike on a mess over and over and over again
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for simple straightforward tasks
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those kinds of incentives if you do this then you get that
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their re
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first pass at our algorithmic
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set of rules we have to follow along and get a right answer
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if then rewards carrots and sticks
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outstanding
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but when
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task gets more complicated when it requires a