Daniel Pink on Drive, Motivation, and Incentives

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4.7 • 4.3K Ratings

🗓️ 30 August 2010

⏱️ 79 minutes

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Summary

Daniel Pink, author of Drive, talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about drive, motivation, compensation, and incentives. Pink discusses the implications of using monetary rewards as compensation in business and in education. Much of the conversation focuses on the research underlying the book, Drive, research from behavioral psychology that challenges traditional claims by economists on the power of monetary and other types of incentive. The last part of the conversation turns toward education and the role of incentives in motivating or demotivating students.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Econ Talk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. I'm your host Russ Roberts
0:13.9	of George Mason University and Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Our website is econtalk.org
0:21.2	where you can subscribe, find other episodes, comment on this podcast, and find links to
0:26.5	other information related to today's conversation. Our email address is mailadicontalk.org. We'd
0:33.6	love to hear from you. Today is August 17, 2010 and my guest is Daniel Pink. His latest book
0:43.5	is Drive, Surprising Truth about what motivates us. Dan, welcome back to Econ Talk.
0:49.2	It's great to be here once again, Russ. Now your book argues that we have the wrong models of
0:55.3	motivation in how we understand business and education. Explain what you think has changed
1:01.9	in motivation and what we ought to do about it. Well, I went back and looked at about 50 years
1:07.7	of research in behavioral science, mostly psychology and then in recent years a little bit of economics.
1:14.4	And what it says, at least the way I read the research fairly clearly, is that the classic
1:20.6	set of motivators that we use inside of businesses, but also I think in schools and in our
1:27.2	families, what I call if-then motivators. If you do this, then you get that. They work
1:33.1	pretty well for certain kinds of things. They work pretty well for relatively simple,
1:37.9	straightforward, algorithmic sort of work where you're turning the same screw the same way
1:46.2	on an assembly line or stuffing envelopes or adding up columns of figures in a white collar
1:51.7	office. The evidence is pretty cool. They get you to focus. They do reasonably well. The
1:57.0	trouble is that for work that requires greater complexity, greater creativity, greater conceptual
2:06.5	thinking, there's a fair amount of evidence that says that those kinds of motivators, again,
2:11.5	the if-then motivators, often don't work very well and can sometimes backfire.
2:18.9	My contention is that most work in advanced economies is becoming less routine and algorithmic,
2:25.9	because that kind of work you can send overseas or automate it. As a result, we have this kind
	...

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