Deciphering the Cause of Human Motivation

Original source: SimoleonSense.com .

Introduction & Excerpts (Via Anand Giridhardas)

Call it, perhaps, the great showdown over the nature of human motivation.

One camp regards our species as Homo Incentivus. It conceives of us as shrewd responders to carrots and sticks, hooked on a diet of incentives and external rewards. This camp bristles at the thought that we do things just because we love them or believe they are right.

It views corporate social responsibility and such as self-interest in disguise.

Homo Incentivus is behind the eight-figure bonus (“But they won’t work otherwise!”). It guides the efforts to administer standardized tests on students and to link teacher salaries to the tests. Its thinking lies behind sanctions on Iran. It informs the use of economic inducements worldwide to get people to smoke or eat less, exercise more, have more children or fewer.

In another camp are champions of Homo Emoticus. They accept that we relish carrots and fear sticks. But there is so much more to us, they say: our desire for belonging, for meaning, for the bliss that comes with great love or a newborn child.

The good news today is that technology is rechanneling our free time toward a new crop of relatively selfless, participatory activities. We live in a new golden age of communal amateurism — collaborative amateur encyclopedia making, cat-photo captioning, subtitle writing and the like. And much of these shared endeavors, Mr. Shirky notes, are pursued for their own sake, not for external rewards.

The root of “amateur” is, after all, the Latin for “love,” as the book points out. And so if incentives are everywhere around us today, we are surrounded, too, by evidence of our many other reasons for doing and being.

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