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What motivates people to work hard and succeed at difficult tasks?
In the 1930’s, a psychologist named Karl Duncker devised a famous experiment to try to find out.
It’s called the Candle Problem.
Small groups are given a candle, a box of tacks, and a book of matches. Their assignment is simple: affix the candle to the wall in such a way that the wax doesn’t drip onto the table.
How about tacking the candle to the wall? That doesn’t work. Is it possible to use some melted wax as a glue that will hold up the candle? That doesn’t prevent drippage, either.
It takes most groups 5-10 minutes to come up with the best solution.
Their challenge is to overcome what Duncker called “functional fixedness” – that is, the sense that when we look at the resources we have at hand, we already know what they are and what to do with them.
Most people, for instance, overlook the possible usefulness of the box that holds the tacks. It turns out that the best solution to the Candle Problem is to tack the box to the wall so the candle can stand upright inside it.
A Princeton researcher later decided to explore what effect incentives might have on coming up with such novel solutions. He told Group One that he was going to time their efforts at solving the Candle Problem as a means of establishing benchmarks. He promised Group Two that if they were in the top 25% of all times, they would each receive a couple of bucks. He told Group Three that if they were the fastest of all the groups, they would receive a nice prize – the equivalent of about $100 in today’s money.
How do you think the groups performed?
It definitely mattered that two of the groups were promised a financial reward. But not perhaps as one might expect.
On average, it took the incentivized groups three and a half minutes longer to succeed. In fact, researchers have discovered that giving people more money almost never improves their ability to solve problems. As Daniel Pink points out in his book Drive, people aren’t motivated the way we usually think.
One of the most cherished approaches to leadership of the past century was to treat people like donkeys. If you show them a carrot, they will go forward. If you whack them with a stick, they will go forward a few steps faster.
Many corporate policies are plainly carrot-and-stick. If you do this we will give you big bucks (and no whammies, as the game show would no doubt put it). But if you screw things up, we will punish you, shame you, and maybe even take your job away.
Carrots and sticks may work for jobs that are “algorithmic” – that is, that follow a set path. This would include taking out the trash, painting a wall, and trying out a new recipe for enchiladas.
But Pink asserts that financial incentives do not usually clarify thinking and sharpen creativity for dealing with tasks that are “heuristic” – complex problems that require breaking from old patterns to discover new paths.
Is it OK to give a child an allowance for performing certain household chores, and to reward exceptional performance? Of course.
But all of us dream that our children will one day want to take on bigger challenges than taking out the trash. We hope they will want to address problems that are interesting, difficult (maybe even exasperating), and will require significant creativity – especially if the solutions to those problems have the capacity to bless many people.
They may not get big bucks for succeeding at such jobs, but they will receive things money can never buy: peace, joy, and a deep sense of fulfillment.
In general, penalties and rewards may generate short-term results. But they are powerless to win human hearts.
That’s why carrot-and-stick thinking is gradually falling out of favor.
Most people, after all, don’t like being treated like donkeys. More significantly, we have acquired plenty of evidence that eye-popping incentives rarely improve creativity. If we doubled someone’s salary and told them to try twice as hard to bring peace to the Middle East, is it more likely they would succeed?
That brings us to an important question: Is God into carrots and sticks?
A lot of churches seem to think so. If you’re really good, you get the ultimate carrot. You get to go to heaven. If you’re really bad, you get the ultimate stick. You go straight to hell and have to spend the rest of eternity watching every episode of the purple dinosaur Barney and Friends on a continuous loop.
But such theology simply doesn’t win human hearts. If 20 centuries have taught us anything, it’s that people aren’t ultimately motivated to become better human beings by the promise of heaven or the threat of hell.
But there is something that motivates people from the inside out.
It’s love.
The apostle John writes, “There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love. We love because he first loved us” (I John 4:18-19).
If you fall in love with another person, your behavior will be transformed.
God’s love is so remarkable and so unexpected that if we crack open our hearts and receive even a taste of it, our lives will never be the same.
People motivated by love will do their utmost to solve the toughest problems, bravely face the unknown without guarantees, and even surrender their own lives – not in the hope of getting richer, but because there’s nothing more worthy, absorbing, and gratifying than loving the ones we love.
Here we’re catching a glimpse of the very heart of our Father in heaven, who “loved the world so much that he sent his only Son…”
It’s true that appeals to our bank accounts, reputation, security, and fears may get our attention for a little while.
But love actually has the power to change things for the better.
And God’s love changes everything.