Payoff: The Hidden Logic That Shapes Our Motivations

by Dan Ariely

Overview

Bestselling author Dan Ariely reveals fascinating new insights into motivation—showing that the subject is far more complex than we ever imagined.

Every day we work hard to motivate ourselves, the people we live with, the people who work for and do business with us. In this way, much of what we do can be defined as being “motivators.” From the boardroom to the living room, our role as motivators is complex, and the more we try to motivate partners and children, friends and coworkers, the clearer it becomes that the story of motivation is far more intricate and fascinating than we’ve assumed.

Payoff investigates the true nature of motivation, our partial blindness to the way it works, and how we can bridge this gap. With studies that range from Intel to a kindergarten classroom, Ariely digs deep to find the root of motivation—how it works and how we can use this knowledge to approach important choices in our own lives. Along the way, he explores intriguing questions such as: Can giving employees bonuses harm productivity? Why is trust so crucial for successful motivation? What are our misconceptions about how to value our work? How does your sense of your mortality impact your motivation?

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781501120046
Publisher:	Simon & Schuster/ TED
Publication date:	11/15/2016
Series:	TED Books Series
Pages:	128
Sales rank:	211,973
Product dimensions:	5.10(w) x 7.10(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Dan Ariely, James B. Duke Professor of Psychology and Behavioral Economics at Duke University, is a founding member of the Center for Advanced Hindsight. He is the author of Payoff and the New York Times bestsellers Predictably Irrational, The Upside of Irrationality, and The Honest Truth About Dishonesty.

Simon Jones is an English actor and award-winning audiobook narrator. Besides winning many AudioFile Earphones Awards for narration, he has won the prestigious Audie Award for best narration, including for top prize of Audiobook of the Year. He was named a "Golden Voice" by AudioFile magazine and as "Narrator of the Year" in 2005 by Publishers Weekly. As an actor, he has been featured in numerous Broadway productions and has appeared in the films The Devil's Own, Twelve Monkeys, For Love or Money, Green Card, Brazil, Monty Python's Meaning of Life, and Miracle on 34th Street remake. His television appearances include a role in The Cosby Mysteries and Murder She Wrote. He studied at Cambridge University and the legendary Cambridge Footlights Dramatic Club.

Read an Excerpt

Payoff

Life is never made unbearable by circumstances, but only by lack of meaning and purpose.

—Viktor E. Frankl

A few years ago, I was invited to speak about the topic of decision making to a group of a few hundred engineers at a big Seattle-based software firm. During the years before I met them, the mandate for this carefully recruited, experienced, and brainy bunch had been to create something fabulously innovative that would become the next big thing for this staid software company.

The engineers dove into the challenge with enthusiasm. They conducted tons of research. They built an almost-working prototype. They were all proud of their work, having spent long hours—including evenings and weekends away from their families—to make this awesome thing happen. They believed their invention would transform their company and make it the innovation giant it should have been.

After a short introduction, I started talking about some research that I was working on. I began by describing a set of experiments that Emir Kamenica (a professor at the University of Chicago), Drazen Prelec (a professor at MIT), and I had carried out—studies that unexpectedly resonated with the engineers.4

In these experiments, we asked participants to build some Lego Bionicles. These are marvelously weird Lego creatures that kids can creatively assemble in many different ways. We picked Bionicles as the object of our investigation because the joy of Lego is almost universal across cultures and ages, and because building with them resembles, at least conceptually, the creative process that is so central to innovation in the workplace.

We divided the participants into two different conditions. We offered the participants in one group $2 for the first Bionicle they built. We told them that at the end of the experiment, we would disassemble the Bionicles, put the pieces back in the box, and use the same Bionicle parts for the next participant. The participants seemed perfectly happy with this process.

After these participants assembled their first Bionicle, we placed their completed creations under the table for later disassembly. We then asked: “Would you like to build another one, this time for eleven cents less, for $1.89?” If the person said yes, we gave him another one, and when they finished that one, we asked, “Do you want to build another?” this time for $1.78, another for $1.67, and so on. At some point, the participants said, “No more. It’s not worth it for me.” On average, participants in this condition built eleven Bionicles for a total take-home pay of a bit more than $14.

The participants in the second condition were promised the same amount of money per Bionicle, so they had the same financial incentive. But this time, as soon as they finished building a Bionicle and started working on the next one, we began disassembling their completed Bionicle. Right before their eyes. Once we finished undoing their work, we placed the parts back in the box.

The first group built their Bionicles in what we called the “meaningful” condition, so called because they were allowed to feel that they had completed their work satisfactorily. We called the second condition the “Sisyphic” condition—named after the ancient Greek story about Sisyphus, who was condemned by the gods to roll a boulder up a hill only to have it roll down again and again for eternity. Those in the Sisyphic condition managed to build an average of seven Bionicles—four fewer than those in the “meaningful” condition.

As I described this experiment to the engineers, I added that we also looked at individual differences in terms of Lego love. Some people are naturally enthusiastic about building Bionicles, while others not so much. We wanted to see how this individual difference translated to productivity. In the meaningful condition, some participants were unenthusiastic about making Bionicles, so they made fewer of them. In contrast, those who loved making these creations were happy to assemble them for relatively small amounts of money. Basically, people who loved the task kept on going because they enjoyed the process and found meaning in it. (Of course, we weren’t talking about Meaning with a capital M. These folks weren’t curing cancer or building bridges; they were building plastic toys, and they understood that their creatures would be taken apart quite soon.)

But here’s what was so interesting: In the Sisyphic condition, we discovered that there was no relationship between the internal joy of making Bionicles and productivity. Those who weren’t terribly excited about Bionicles created about seven of them—the same number as those who loved building them. In general, we should expect that those who love Bionicles would build more of them, but by dismantling their creations right before their eyes, we crushed any joy that the Bionicle-loving participants could get out of this otherwise fun activity.

As I was describing these results, one of the chief engineers stopped me. “We completely understand the experiment you’re talking about,” he said, “because we’ve all just been part of the Sisyphic condition.”

They all nodded in sorrowful agreement. The chief engineer continued talking. “Last week, our CEO told us that our project was canceled, that the whole initiative was going to be scrapped, and that soon we would be assigned to other projects.”

Up to that point, I had wondered why the people sitting in front of me were so lethargic and depressed. Now I understood.

“Your situation,” I told them, “is also the way that some movies depict breaking the spirit of prisoners. Does anyone here remember the famous prison-yard scene from the movie The Last Castle?”

Several people nodded. In the movie, Robert Redford plays the role of Eugene Irwin, a court-martialed three-star lieutenant general who is sentenced to ten years in prison. Soon after he is imprisoned, he challenges the warden over the bad treatment of prisoners and is punished for insubordination. His punishment is to move enormous rocks from one side of the prison yard to another. The task is so daunting that many of the prisoners think he will pass out before finishing; others cheer him on. After hours of back-breaking work, Irwin manages a final push of energy. He pulls up the last huge rock, carries it across the yard, and drops it triumphantly onto the pile. The prisoners go wild. It looks like a happy ending—until a few seconds later when the warden tells the prisoner he’s not finished with the job and orders him to put the rocks back.

Editorial Reviews

2016-09-22
The latest in the TED series: a quirky exploration of the mysteries behind human motivation, in business and relationships.Ariely (Psychology and Behavioral Economics/Duke Univ.; The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty: How We Lie to EveryoneEspecially Ourselves, 2012, etc.) was always fascinated with why we pursue goals, whether for financial remuneration or personal satisfaction. We are the CEOs of our own lives.Whatever our official job descriptions, we are all part-time motivators, writes the author, whose interest in such issues stems from tragedy: badly burned in an accident when he was young, hes since wondered why some are more driven to rise above such circumstances. He recalls that the devastating role that helplessness played in my own experiencemade me more deeply appreciate the challenges of being badly injured, the complexity of recovery, and the ways that my experience had deeply changed me. Today, Ariely documents psychological experiments performed at tech companies and universities, convincing him that humans incentivize themselves and others in consistent yet enigmatic ways. He argues that workplace initiativese.g., restrictions regarding employee cubiclescrush our natural motivation. Yet financial compensation is far from an automatic cure-all; though almost all companies use some kind of bonuslittle is known about how effective bonuses really are. At a semiconductor factory, Ariely found a promised voucher for a pizza or praise from a supervisor provoked productivity more reliably than extra money. In nonoccupational contexts, he notes, we have a deep attachment to our own ideas, explaining the satisfaction found in creative pursuits. We are even motivated to control our destinies after deathsee: the mummified nobility of China or Egypt. Ariely writes in an approachable, chipper style, but some readers may find his ambiguous findings unsatisfying, as when he writes, it is impossible to come up with one simple set of motivational rules. A mostly provocative account of how inner turmoil drives us.

Kirkus Reviews