the candle problem
Dan Pink talked to TED about motivation. He focused on the candle problem, and on modifications of it done by Sam Glucksberg which looked at how reward affected performance.
The results: with problems like this, extrinsic reward makes you slower.
Pink rightly draws the conclusion: intrinsic motivation is what we need for a lot of things.
He elaborates on this approach built round intrinsic motivation. Instead of incentives, this means:
AUTONOMY
MASTERY
PURPOSE
autonomy: the urge to direct our own lives
mastery: the desire to get better and better at something that matters
purpose: the yearning to do what we do in the service of something larger than ourselves
Watch it:
Pink focuses on implications for business, but to me there are equally important implications for learning that are worth exploring.
§ § §
How much do goals interfere, in the same way that incentives can?
“making unhappy, unlucky and expected discoveries by design” is a pretty good description of what happens in formal education, when “learning outcomes” are specified in advance.
At least, after listening to Pink, where candle-problem type thinking is needed.
§ § §
Demming knew about this already . See among his 14 points:
10. Eliminate slogans, exhortations, and targets for the work force asking for zero defects and new levels of productivity. Such exhortations only create adversarial relationships, as the bulk of the causes of low quality and low productivity belong to the system and thus lie beyond the power of the work force.
11. a. Eliminate work standards (quotas) on the factory floor. Substitute leadership.
b. Eliminate management by objective. Eliminate management by numbers, numerical goals. Substitute leadership.
12. a. Remove barriers that rob the hourly worker of his right to pride of workmanship. The responsibility of supervisors must be changed from sheer numbers to quality.
b. Remove barriers that rob people in management and in engineering of their right to pride of workmanship. This means, inter alia,” abolishment of the annual or merit rating and of management by objective
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Tags: attention, brain, candle, economics, emotion, mind, motivation, paradox, Pink, psychology, zemblanity
negativity bias
Photo by Optick
See Nancy Etcoff on “the surprising science of happiness”.
One small thing that exemplify the negativity bias that she talks about is that we can detect sweetness at 1 part per 200. We can detect bitterness at 1 part per 2 million!
This could stand for all the ways we are more sensitive to the bad – need to be to survive.
I will need to watch this one again. There’s a lot to think about in there.
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Tags: bias, brain, choice, emotion, Etcoff, happiness, mind, psychology
Marshmallows revisited…
“TED has reached 100,000 Facebook fans today! Thank you, TEDsters — Here is the premiere of Joachim de Posada’s talk “Don’t Eat the Marshmallow” exclusively for you. Please enjoy the high-definition talk from TED U 2009.”
Update:
Now it’s on the TED site:
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Tags: choice, gratification, happiness, marshmallow, psychology
predictably irrational
While we’re talking about behavioural economics we should mention Dan Ariely.
Ariely, whose revised and enlarged Pridictably Irrational has just been published (see his blog, predictablyirrational.com, see excerpts), has just been on TED again. A fantastic talk, about irrationality,
Dan Ariely asks, Are we in control of our decisions?
So the apparent difference in preferences for organ donation:
is actually merely a product of whether people are asked to tick the box to be a donor, or to tick the box to not be a donor.
Not a choice, but how the decision is framed.
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Tags: Ariely, brain, choice, economics, irrationality, morals, psychology
honesty
So when people play a game like the Prisoner’s Dilemma, what do they actually do?
According to Peter Lunn in Basic Instincts, about half “co-operate”
He mentions how honesty boxes work on a similar principle (see BBC article).
Is this a kind of “superationality” at work? – that we know that we’ll get more out of it if we co-operate, and know that others know that too?
Or is it that either in evolution or in our lifetime we have repeated the prisoner’s dilemma in various ways again and again, and that with the iterated version it pays to co-operate?
As wikipedia puts it, successful strategies are:
- Nice
- The most important condition is that the strategy must be “nice”, that is, it will not defect before its opponent does (this is sometimes referred to as an “optimistic” algorithm). Almost all of the top-scoring strategies were nice; therefore a purely selfish strategy will not “cheat” on its opponent, for purely utilitarian reasons first.
- Retaliating
- However, Axelrod contended, the successful strategy must not be a blind optimist. It must sometimes retaliate. An example of a non-retaliating strategy is Always Cooperate. This is a very bad choice, as “nasty” strategies will ruthlessly exploit such players.
- Forgiving
- Successful strategies must also be forgiving. Though players will retaliate, they will once again fall back to cooperating if the opponent does not continue to defect. This stops long runs of revenge and counter-revenge, maximizing points.
- Non-envious
- The last quality is being non-envious, that is not striving to score more than the opponent (impossible for a ‘nice’ strategy, i.e., a ‘nice’ strategy can never score more than the opponent).
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Tags: anthropology, choice, dilemma, honesty, logic, Lunn, mind, morals, paradox, prisoner, psychology, zemblanity
three monks no water
We all know that sometimes it does work like the Prisoner’s Dilemma.
Take this Chinese story, Three Monks No Water:
Everyone is somehow “forced” to settle for less than the best, even if it is an “equilibrium”.
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Tags: choice, dilemma, logic, monks, morals, prisoner, psychology, zemblanity
basic instincts
It’s all clear now.
I’m reading the Peter Lunn’s Basic Instincts, a book which according to the Guardian, gives rational economic man the kicking he deserves”.
Lunn takes it all much further back than The Trap and the Prisoner’s Dilemma.
He takes it back to Adam Smith.
Smith’s insight was that trade between a selfish seller and a selfish buyer, trading partners who cared not at all for each other, could bring gains to both. In other words, he showed that selfish motives could result in mutual gain
- but goes on to point out:
Neither Adam Smith, nor anyone since, has shown either that buyers or sellers actually are selfish, or that to enjoy mutual gains from each other from trade they need to be.
These simple assumptions, of rationality and selfishness, proved to be so powerful, beguiling even, that mainstream economics has occupied itself with mathematically working out their consequences, mostly abandoning observation of what people actually do.
The technical approach to economics, characterized by hypothetical economic models, climaxed in the 1950s when Kenneth Arrow and Gerard Debreu published a celebrated paper. It used the latest mathematical techniques to derive a proof, which showed that in the model of competitive equilibrium (a hypothetical free-market economy of independent, selfish, rational, perfectly informed individuals and firms), prices could adjust such that the economy echieved a stable equilibrium of perfect efficiency.
But, of course, that the assumptions can lead to such a powerful and remarkable proof does not mean that they are correct…
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Tags: economics, history, Lunn, psychology, Smith
actual behaviour
Yes, it doesn’t correlate with human beings’ actual behaviour.
Behavioral economics, the branch of economics that looks at people’s actual economic behaviour, has a well-known example that has basically the same structure as the prisoner’s dilemma. It’s called a public goods game. Both players get €10. They can keep it, or put it into a “pot”. The experimenter will multiply the pot money, say by 1.5, and then share it between the two players.
You can see how it’s the same. If you “defect” you end up with more than if you don’t, whether or not your opponent has put any in the pot.
But people don’t defect. As wikipedia puts it: “In fact, the Nash equilibrium is rarely seen in experiments; people do tend to add something into the pot.”
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Tags: anthropology, choice, dilemma, logic, Lunn, morals, psychology, zemblanity
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