Narrator: It’s logical to think that if you want people to work harder, the best way to do that is to pay them more. But is money really the best motivator? Or do social pressures, like living up to others’ expectations, matter more than money? Chicago Booth’s Thomas Talhelm investigates how different types of incentives, financial and social, influence our behavior, and what that reveals about human motivation.
Thomas Talhelm: A colleague of mine, Devin Pope, was presenting a study that he had done on a website called MTurk. He asked people to push the A and B buttons on their keyboard as much as they could for 10 minutes. It was a stupid task, just a really silly little thing—just push those buttons as much as you could for 10 minutes. And what he did before that was he gave people a ton of different motivations, reasons to work harder, and broadly speaking, those were two types of motivations. So one was money. You pay people money for the more times they push the button. So, for example, in one condition, they gave people an extra few cents for every 100 times they pushed the A and B buttons. The other bucket is like psychology. So for example, one thing they had people read was a social norm. So they said, you know, most people tried really hard on this and they scored 2,000 points. So they pushed the button 2,000 times. And so that doesn’t involve any extra money, but it’s a psychological motivation. And what Devin found when he gave this task to, it was about 10,000 different people on this website. What he found was that money always won. Money outperformed all the psychological nudges, all the psychological ways to motivate people. And so I remember asking Devin, I was like, “You know, Devin, on this website, most of the workers are from the United States, but actually the second-biggest country on this platform is India.” And I said, you know, “Did you split out the data from India to see if it looked any different from the data from the US?” And he said no. I said, “Are you interested in that?” “No.” “Would you gimme the data?” “Sure.” So he sent me the data, and I started to look through his data. And what I found is that the data from India looked really different from the data from the United States.
Narrator: Across multiple studies, American participants consistently aligned with the Homo economicus model, a framework that assumes individuals will act rationally and in their own self-interest, working harder for financial rewards and slacking off when there’s no money on the line or when that money goes to charity. Across all the conditions, monetary incentives increased effort by over 100 percent for participants in the US and the UK. But in China, India, and Mexico, the boost for money was less than 50 percent. The researchers also looked at how many participants quit the work task at the first possible chance, at the contractual minimum, how many people did the bare minimum and how many people continued to work beyond the minimum. Differences were big. In one study, over half of the American participants quit at the first chance. In, Mexico, less than 10 percent did. The studies documented cultural differences when it comes to the power of money, but the researchers wondered: Are there also differences between the genders?
Thomas Talhelm: I think, so my intuition going into it, and I think a lot of people’s intuition, is that the Homo economicus model, the idea of being selfish and just maximizing my own dollars and cents, that feels like it describes men more than women, right? And the idea that men are sort of, you know, selfish and profit maximizing feels sort of like a guy thing, right? And what we found was that it actually really depends on culture. So in the US and in the UK, the Homo economicus model described men better than it did women. But outside of these Western cultures, it was actually flipped. It was actually the women that were more, sort of, profit maximizing and, you know, selfish, you could say, than the men. So the bottom line here is there doesn’t seem to be a universal gender difference.
Narrator: What the researchers found is that motivation isn’t universal. It’s shaped by culture, norms, and local context. Policymakers, employers, and nonprofits should consider culture when they design incentive programs and resist a one-size-fits-all approach. Whether the goal is to motivate employees, encourage people to get vaccines, or increase the use of mosquito nets to prevent malaria, understanding culture pays off.
