CHAPTER 2A . . . and the Special Circumstances When They Do Carrots and sticks aren’t all bad. If they were, Motivation would never have flourished so long or accomplished so much. While an operating system centered around rewards and punishments has outlived its usefulness and badly needs an upgrade, that doesn’t mean we should scrap its every piece. Indeed, doing so would run counter to the science. The scholars exploring human motivation have revealed not only the many glitches in the traditional approach, but also the narrow band of circumstances in which carrots and sticks do their jobs reasonably well. The starting point, of course, is to ensure that the baseline rewards—wages, salaries, benefits, and soon are adequate and fair. Without a healthy baseline, motivation of any sort is difficult and often impossible. But once that’s established, there are circumstances where it’s okay to fallback on extrinsic motivators. To understand what those circumstances are, let’s return to the candle problem. In his study, Sam Glucksberg found that the participants who were offered a cash prize took longer to solve the problem than those working in a reward-free environment. The reason, you’ll recall, is that the prospect of a prize narrowed participants focus and limited their ability to see an inventive, nonobvious solution. In the same experiment, Glucksberg presented a separate set of participants with a slightly different version of the problem. Once again, he told half of them he was timing their performance to collect data—and the other half that those
who posted the fastest times could win cash. But he altered things just a bit. Instead of giving participants a box full of tacks, he emptied the tacks onto the desk as shown below.
