The Hidden Logic That Shapes Our Motivations (TED Books)

I'd recommend this read to any supervisor who needs a better understanding of motivation. A person who truly aspires to be a good leader or even a business owner to help their workers be the best they can be.

Much of conventional wisdom about motivation is wrong, according psychologist Dan Ariely. In Payoff, he explains how motivation really works. The reason we should care is that “we are all part-time motivators.” All of us try to get others to do things, whether they are our children, employees, spouses, customers, friends, or people we encounter in everyday situations.

Motivation is not a simple rat-seeking-reward equation. Instead, "We’re motivated by meaning and connection because their effects extend beyond ourselves, beyond our social circle, and maybe even beyond our existence.”

Ariely describes an experiment that found when people see their work immediately discarded, they are much less motivated to continue a paid task than the group that does not see their work discarded. The second group completed an average of 36 percent more Lego Bionicle creations than the first group, with both paid the same per creation.

Another study found that when people are acknowledged for their work, they were willing to work harder for less pay. “Acknowledgment is a kind of human magic—a small human connection, a gift from one person to another that translates into a much larger, more meaningful outcome."

Motivation has been declining among American workers since at least 2000, when Gallup began examining this issue. Today, more than half of employees are disengaged, while 17 percent are “actively disengaged.” Ariely attributes this disengagement in part to the industrial-era view of work that wages are all that matter, that workers aren’t much concerned what happens to their work.

"People dramatically underappreciate the extent and depth to which a feeling of accomplishment influences people. Even 4-year-olds take more pride in a design that was their idea than in a design that was someone else's idea but which the child put together.". When 5-year-olds create a story, they want to be given credit when it is retold.

Researchers found that the egocentric bias in toddlers is also alive and well in adults. Adults who created origami art overvalued their own creations by a factor of five. The more effort we put into the design and assembly of something, the more meaningful it is to us because it has the stamp of our own design, care, and unique identity. Our greatest customization project is raising our own children, in whom we are heavily invested. “We think about our children as priceless, not just because we love them so much but because they are also ours. Raising kids is pretty much a DIY job."

What about money as a motivator? Ariely’s research found that when cash bonuses are large, output decreases significantly. One study compared results of three rewards: a cash bonus, a pizza voucher, and a compliment. The pizza voucher boosted productivity by 6.7 percent, almost identical to the 6.6 percent boost from the verbal reward. The cash incentive performed the worst, coming in at 4.9 percent.

Those offered cash bonuses the day before, however, suffered a 13 percent decline in performance the next day when no bonuses were provided. Overall for the week, those who had the bonus on the first day had a 6.5 percent drop in performance compared to the control group.
So what works better to motivate? “The more a company can offer employees opportunities for meaning and connection, the harder those employees are likely to work and the more enduring their loyalty is likely to be…As people feel connected, challenged, and engaged; as they feel more trusted and autonomous; and as they get more recognition for their efforts, the total amount of motivation, joy, and output for everyone grows much larger.”

People are motivated to invest more in long-term than in short-term relationships. Companies can communicate a long-term commitment to their employees by the way they invest in them. Employees who feel meaning and connection on the job work harder and are more loyal. “As we become meaningfully engaged with our work, we become both happier and more productive—a win-win situation if there ever was one.”
In sum, we undermine motivation when we ignore, criticize, belittle or destroy the work others do. “To motivate ourselves and others successfully, we need to provide a sense of connection and meaning…Arguably, the most powerful motivator in the world is our connection to others.”

This book is shorter than his other works, including one I reviewed -- The Honest Truth About Dishonesty -- which had more substance. Nonetheless, Payoff is informative and a quick read. ###

Prof. Ariely has incredible ideas, but this book lacks details, in an easy to read form. Book could have used more pages, perhaps a co-author, and a list of reference books on the subject of motivation.

Alexander Pope said, "A little learning (knowledge) is a dangerous thing." Yes, Dan Ariely points out that motivation is a complex subject, but he leaves the reader hanging, with but a few ideas, in a tiny volume. Perhaps we need just a few more ideas to make motivation really work for us.

Also, it might help to repeat these motivational ideas, over and over, or watch some of Dan Ariely's YouTube videos, over and over, again.

One idea I would suggest is the motivation of SENSATION and SENSITIVITY. That is, we can often become more motivated and persistent by focusing more of our attention on the sensations of our actions. When I am walking to the store, I can try to stay in TOUCH with and ENJOY the feelings in my feet, (as NIKE has been able to cash in on). Motivation does not have to be just about getting stuff done, but it can include the feelings involved. (Dan Ariely may not feel his body as much because of his burn injuries, but he might consider this angle).

That said, motivation is my great concern for myself and for students in our failing schools. So, I am thrilled to have his ideals especially focused on PAYOFFS and SABOTAGE. Rewards do matter and motivation is all too often sabotaged by ourselves and by others.

Ariely might consider a longer, more well thought out volume on motivation in the future. So, I am reluctantly, giving it a rating of 3.

In Predictably Irrational, Revised and Expanded Edition: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions, Dan Ariely shares a number of “lessons” he learned from what he calls "experiments" in his life, each of which struck him as being counterintuitive. For example, everything is relative...even when "it shouldn't be"...or in fact isn't. That is, our mind can "play tricks" on us and thus we tend to see what we expect to see, hear what we expect to hear, etc. Images and sounds are relative to their context or frame-of-reference within which we place it. He develops several of his key insights in his latest book as he examines “the hidden logic that shapes our motivations.” The material in the book is based on Ariely’s October 2012 TED Talk, “What Makes Us Feel Good About Our Work?” He reiterates one of the most important lessons he has learned: “To motivate ourselves and others successfully, we need to provide a sense of connection and meaning – remembering that meaning is not always synonymous with personal happiness.”

Here are a few brief excerpts from Ariely’s lively and eloquent narrative:

Having observed a hospitalized friend’s efforts to delay painful but urgently needed treatment, Ariely “realized the devastating roles that helplessness played in my own experience. It made me more deeply appreciate the challenges of being badly injured, the complexity of recovery, and the ways that my experience has deeply changed me. I also realized how many of our motivations spring from trying to conquer a sense of helplessness and reclaim even a tiny modicum of control over our lives.”

“The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche argued that that life’s greatest rewards spring from our experience of pain…[And then after conversations with his friend and his family], I became motivated by a feeling of identification and empathy for them. I felt that my own suffering had not been pointless. And that I could do something to help other human beings — something that I’m uniquely qualified to do.”

“The point is that these seemingly odd and irrational motivations get us to do things that are complex, difficult, and unpleasant. But they go beyond helping people in need. They motivate us in every aspect of our lives — whether in our personal relationships, in our indie ideal pursuits, or in the workplace. This is because human motivation is actually based on a time scale that is long, sometimes even longer than our lifetimes.”

“We are certainly far from grasping the full complexity of motivation, but the journey to understand the thousands of strange and wonderful nuances beneath Motivation with a capital M is going to be exciting, interesting, important, and useful. And if we do it right, the journey will reveal the secrets of more productivity, love, and meaning. Now, that’s motivating.”

I hope these brief excerpts will ignite your motivation to read Payoff and then, if you haven’t already, read his earlier works, notably Predictably Irrational.

As I worked my through Payoff, I was again reminded of Alan Watts’ book, The Book. He explains that there is no need for a new religion or a new bible. "We need a new experience -- a new feeling of what it is to be 'I.' The lowdown (which is, of course, the secret and profound view) on life is that our normal sensation of self is a hoax, or, at best, a temporary role that we are playing, or have been conned into playing -- with our own tacit consent, just as every hypnotized person is basically willing to be hypnotized. The most strongly enforced of all known taboos is the taboo against knowing who or what you really are behind the mask of your apparently separate, independent, and isolated ego."
I am also reminded of the key concept in Ernest Becker's The Denial of Death. He acknowledges that all of us die eventually. Only the suicide decides the circumstances in which physical death occurs. However, Becker suggests that there is another death that CAN be denied: That which occurs when we become totally preoccupied with fulfilling others' expectations of us.

For me, that is the essential point in The Book. Dan Ariely seems to be making that same point when stressing the importance of efforts — never quitting — “to conquer a sense of helplessness and reclaim even a tiny modicum of control over our lives.” We have every right to cherish that expectation. More to the point, we must embrace the reality that "meaning is not always synonymous with personal happiness.”

* * *

Dan Ariely is the James B Duke Professor of Psychology and Behavioral Economics at Duke University. He publishes widely in the leading scholarly journals in economics, psychology, and business. His work has been featured in a variety of media including The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Boston Globe, Business 2.0, Scientific American, Science and CNN. He splits his time between Durham NC and the rest of the world.

Payoff does a nice job documenting some interesting aspects of human passion and motivation, such as our need to feel that our work is appreciated, and our exaggerated opinions of our own creations. Ariel, as always, explains these phenomena clearly, and documents them cleanly in controlled laboratory experiments.

However, as is so often the case in behavioral economics and social psychology, his analysis takes only a proximate perspective--how things feel to us as humans, what we like and want--and fails to consider an ultimate perspective--why our passions and motivations work this way. As a consequence, he misses a broader picture that these phenomena fit into, and draws some misleading implications.

In particular, it should not come as much of a surprise that we become more passionate about projects and domains that others seem to value and reward, and are demotivated when we learn that others don't recognize or even notice our efforts; how else would we point our investments into the directions that are liable to yield financial and social rewards? Nor should it come as much of a surprise that we hype the value of our own work and creations; how else could we sell our contributions or skills to others? These results only come as a surprise if we presume that people's passions and motivations are perfectly optimized for the particular context Dan's experiments test them in; experiments which by design don't have future repercussions. These experiments only come as much of a surprise if we ignore the fact that people's passions and tastes are endogenous; shaped by feedback from the environment on what's important. These experiments only come as much of a surprise if we ignore the fact that people's incentives to sell to others or to find out what others like often gets internalized into or own drives and tastes.

Such phenomena fit in with a broader, fundamental question: what drives our passions. What makes some people devote their lives to playing chess. Others to science. What inspires us to care about rock climbing? Or to be the world's expert on US postal stamps? Such passions are an integral part of the human experience, and take a front row seat in history as well as literature. But also a puzzling part of the human experience, from the perspective of evolutionary and learning processes. Why would we come to care so fundamentally about such non-intrinsically functional goals? Why devote our lives to such, from a genetic perspective, seemingly frivolous pursuits? Dan's data, without him noticing, provides evidence to an answer: we become passionate about the things that are likely to garner social and financial rewards. Our comparative advantage. Those things that are highly valued by society, that we are also particularly good at. And of course, once we have invested in projects and become experts in certain domains, it behooves us to convince others that these projects and domains are especially worthy of social esteem and financial rewards. In both cases, we won't just consciously keep track of these goals and values, but come to believe them ourselves.

Dan's focus, as is so often the case in these fields, on people's irrationality, unfortunately prevented him from seeing this broader story about human motivation. A more functional account for this apparently non-functional behavior.

And this comes at a risk: without understanding the function, it is easy to spot the benefits and miss out on the costs, giving erroneous prescriptions. For instance, Dan notices that employees are more motivated when their employees notice and show appreciation for their work. So Dan suggests that even projects that turn out not to be useful and get killed should still be reviewed and complimented by management. As if this come for free. But it doesn't. And if Dan had thought about the function underlying this quirky motivational system, he would have seen the hidden cost: Of course, such recognition also positive reinforces the work that turned out not to be useful, giving employees the wrong feedback on what skills they should invest in learning and how they should allocate their time. Of course management benefits from being nice, but sometimes the cues we send, are sent for a reason. How can one give advice against them before understanding both the costs and the benefits? Before one understands the function?

This book is both highly engaging and full of relevant insights that we can all apply to our own lives. Once you start, it is hard to put it down, and after you read it, the lessons stick with you. So will the examples and compelling research findings used to back up Dan's advice on how to more effectively motivate people. At first I was going to say that this is a book that every manager should read, but it is in fact a book that every person should read (including managers). Of course the findings described here are relevant to managing people in a professional context. However, the research and examples presented in this book is also relevant to improving our personal relationships outside of work! In fact, the research is even relevant to finding greater productivity, happiness and meaning from how we personally choose to spend our money and time. Overall, this book is truly a delightful must read. You will enjoy both the experience of reading it as well as the benefits of having some new insights you can apply right away to your own life. : )

If you are looking for insights behind human motivation you will benefit from reading this book. Dan Ariely addresses the topic beautifully. Whether you seek greater self-motivation or wish to improve the motivational influence you have on others at the work-place or in your personal life this book will help you “think more deeply about the effects of your approach.”
- Listen and read the full review at The Hidden Why dot com. Leigh Martinuzzi - The Hidden Why Guy

Another excellent book by Ariely. It was a real pleasure to read this book, which presents lots of very interesting and useful information. In this book Ariely makes excellent use of his very deep and broad understanding of human psychology, the large body of research he has produced, and his extraordinary ability to write about science in an accessible and interesting manner. I fully agree with the author that the topic is very important to pretty much anyone.

If you are looking for insights behind human motivation you will benefit from reading this book. Dan Ariely addresses the topic beautifully. Whether you seek greater self-motivation or wish to improve the motivational influence you have on others at the work-place or in your personal life this book will help you “think more deeply about the effects of your approach.”
- Listen and read the full review at The Hidden Why dot com. Leigh Martinuzzi - The Hidden Why Guy

Excellent book on human motivation. Lots of great case studies and examples. This book is very well researched and well written and evidenced based on social science research. I recommend this book without qualifications for everyone wanting to understand human motivation.