Cash Bonuses Speed Simple Work but Slow Creative Thinking
The promise of money focuses the mind, which helps when the answer is straight ahead but hurts when it sits off to the side.
TED · The puzzle of motivation | Dan Pink | TEDOffer people cash to solve a creative puzzle faster, and they solve it slower. In one lab test, the group offered money took three and a half minutes longer on average than the group offered nothing extra.
The puzzle works like this. You are brought into a room and handed a candle with tacks and matches to work with. The experimenter tells participants, "Your job is to attach the candle to the wall so the wax doesn't drip onto the table." Many people try to tack the candle itself to the wall, or melt its side and stick it on. Neither works.
The solution requires a shift in how you see the objects. You have to get past what psychologists call functional fixedness, the habit of seeing an object only for its usual use. Here, the box holding the tacks is not just a container. You empty it, tack it to the wall, and stand the candle inside it as a platform.
The test was run by Sam Glucksberg, a scientist now at Princeton University. He timed one group to establish averages. He told a second group that the fastest quarter would get five dollars, and the very fastest person would get twenty dollars, a decent sum for a brief lab task at the time. The paid group was slower.
Then Glucksberg changed one detail. He presented the same puzzle with the tacks already dumped out of the box, so the empty box was sitting in plain view. This time the paid group won easily, because the answer no longer required a leap. With the platform staring at them, participants just had to move straight toward it.
That split explains the rule. Cash that depends on performance narrows attention and concentrates the mind. Narrow focus helps when a task has simple rules and a clear destination, because you zoom straight to the goal. It hurts when the solution sits off to the side, because you stop looking around.
That distinction matters for office work. Routine, rule-based jobs, from certain kinds of accounting and financial analysis to basic computer programming, are easy to outsource or automate, with software doing them faster and lower cost providers doing them cheaper. What is left is creative and conceptual work, the kind without a single clear path. For that work, paying for speed can be the thing that slows people down.
Questions people ask
Why would focusing harder make someone less creative?
Narrow focus means you pay more attention to the goal you were promised and less attention to everything else. That is efficient for following clear steps, but creative solutions often require noticing an unexpected use for an object or idea at the edge of the problem. If your mental spotlight gets smaller, you are less likely to see those peripheral possibilities.
Does this mean companies should never use bonuses?
No. The research finds they work well for straightforward tasks with clear rules, like assembling parts or following a checklist to a known finish line. Problems start when the task requires conceptual thinking, judgment, or originality. In those cases, larger contingent rewards have repeatedly been linked to worse, not better, performance.
What if the bonus were much larger than $20?
It has been tested that way. In later studies, including work with much larger rewards in India, higher pay improved results for purely mechanical work. But once even basic thinking was required, bigger rewards led to poorer performance. So raising the amount does not fix the effect for creative tasks, and it can make it stronger.