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Reward made them 3.5 minutes slower
The candle problem
The task is called the candle problem, created in 1945 by the psychologist Karl Duncker. A person gets a candle, some thumbtacks, and some matches, and has to attach the candle to the wall so the wax doesn't drip onto the table. Many people start by thumbtacking the candle to the wall, and some try melting the side of the candle to stick it there, but neither approach works.
After five or ten minutes, most people land on the solution: the box that holds the tacks becomes a platform for the candle. Getting there means overcoming functional fixedness, the habit of seeing the box only as a container for tacks.
Timing the two groups
Sam Glucksberg, now at Princeton University, timed two groups on the problem. One group was told the timing was to establish averages for how long people typically take. The other group was offered five dollars for landing in the fastest 25%, and 20 dollars for being the fastest of everyone tested that day. The rewarded group took 3.5 minutes longer on average.
The result has been replicated over and over for nearly 40 years. If-then rewards, where doing this earns that, work in some circumstances, but for many tasks they either don't work or do harm.
Why does a full box hide the solution?
In Duncker's own experiments, some people were handed the tacks already inside the box, and others were handed the tacks and the box separately. People who received the empty box solved the problem far more often. A box full of tacks reads as a container, while an empty box reads as an object that could be used for something else. Duncker's English-language monograph On Problem-Solving appeared in 1945.
Why was Glucksberg's result so unexpected?
Mid-century psychology leaned on drive theory, which held that stronger motivation produces better performance. Robert Yerkes and John Dodson's 1908 experiments on mice had already suggested that harder tasks are done best at lower levels of arousal. Glucksberg's candle experiment tested that idea on people with a problem that rewarded a flash of insight. He published the results in 1962 in the Journal of Experimental Psychology.
How does pay change creative writing?
Psychologist Teresa Amabile asked writers to think about either outside reasons for writing, such as money and recognition, or inside reasons, such as enjoyment. Afterward, all of them wrote poems. Panels of judges rated the poems written after thinking about outside reasons as less creative. Amabile published the study in 1985 in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
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