Sam Glucksberg

So pay can get people to do a bit more of something they understand.

But if you are at a company that wants innovation, you shouldn't be doing any kind of pay for performance and attaching pay to performance as little as possible, because we know reliably since the '60s, Sam Glucksberg's experiments, right up to Dan Ariely's experiments in recent day, dozens and dozens of studies and then meta-analyses on the same thing that shows if you want people to be innovative, you will inhibit their problem-solving capabilities by attaching pay to solving a given problem.

And I actually keep this on my desk here as well.

You might, you won't be able to see this in the podcast, but this is called a, this is called a Soma Cube.

Now, here's the kicker.

When psychologist Sam Glucksberg ran this experiment back in the 1960s and offered cash rewards for the fastest solution, the incentivized group took three and a half minutes longer to solve the problem than the group with no reward at all.

Let that sink in.

The reward didn't sharpen thinking.

It's the candle problem.

Now, I wanna tell you about an experiment using the candle problem done by a scientist named Sam Glucksberg, who's now at Princeton University in the US.

This shows the power of incentives.

Here's what he did.

Yeah, and that's the key difference, isn't it? Like classical economics, you don't take into account any of that.

You assume that people are sensible people smart decision-making creatures that they all act in their best interests purely irrationally and it just isn't true which is like a key theme of a lot of your writing which brings me to the study that i really wanted to speak to you about and i've really wanted to speak to you about this for many years because it's the study where i first came across your name large stakes and big mistakes is the name of the study i'll put a little screenshot of it up here as well um Now, I came about this because I started off reading about Sam Glucksberg, the Canadian psychologist, and his candle experiment.

He used Dunker's candle to test what happens when you incentivize people to solve a abstract problem of some kind.

And a few years ago, just a little bit of context.

If we get the incentives right, then we can just make people perfect and align to our mission and solve problems.

And I got to a point where I was kind of thinking, I'm not sure that's true anymore, but I'd love to look into the research.

So I went down this rabbit hole of research and I followed Sam Glucksberg's experiments and many other experiments in the 70s all the way through to your more recent piece of research, Large Stakes and Big Mistakes.

And the reason that it interested me is because you did it in India in order that your research funding could go further.

Interestingly, there's research on how our brains process language, and it gives us something to think about here.

Researcher Uri Hansen and psychologist Sam Glucksberg, they studied how people process negated statements.

The research found that during the early stages of understanding a negated statement, the concept being negated can still become activated.

So in other words, negation isn't necessarily processed by simply making the underlying concept disappear.