Do external rewards kill intrinsic motivations?
As many of you know, I'm really interested in the question of "Would you do it again for free?" If you take developers that are working on open source software for free and you pay them, if you stop paying them, will they still work on open source software? This was the topic of my keynote at GUADEC and will be the topic of my keynotes at LinuxConf Australia and SCALE - the story continues to evolve as I learn more. One of the things I started with was a search to see if there was any relevant data out there. I found the following five studies that explore how external rewards affect internal or intrinsic rewards:
- NYC "pay for grades." New York City is offering financial incentives to students to encourage them to do well in school. Kids are being offered up to $500 a year to take the standardized tests, get good grades and attend school regularly. Barry Schwartz, author of The Paradox of Choice is very critical of the plan. He says that by paying them we may actually make them less likely to want to go to school (unless they are paid.) Instead he says we need to figure out why kids don't want to do well in school. We need to work at making them internally motivated to do well in school.
- Kids & Crayons. In the same New York Times editorial, Barry Schwartz pointed to another study that shows how external rewards can kill intrinsic motivations. This study was done with preschool kids - they were given some special markers. Some of the kids were given awards for playing with the markers and some were not. Those that got rewards were less likely to play with the markers again and less likely to draw pictures. They associated drawing pictures with earning rewards not with having fun and so were less likely to draw pictures just for fun!
- Swiss nuclear waste. In a slightly different twist, a study was done to see if external rewards were more or less motivating than internal rewards from the onset. (Actually, I don't think that's what they were studying but that's the question they ended up answering.) A few years ago Switzerland was trying to figure out where to put its nuclear waste - no town wanted it. Researchers went door to door and asked people if they would take the waste in their town. When they were reminded that it was their duty as a Swiss citizen, 50% of them said ok. When they were told they'd be paid a substantial sum (about six weeks pay every year,) only 25% of them said ok! It wasn't worth the money.
- Israeli Daycare. An Israeli daycare also conducted an unintended study on motivations. They were tired of parents arriving late to pick up their kids, so instead of giving the parents a hard time and explaining that their workers wanted to go home on time they decided to start fining parents. Parents saw the fine as sanctioned baby sitting and started showing up late even more often. They no longer had to feel bad about showing up late because they were paying for the service! The scary thing (for the daycare) was that when they removed the fines (because parents were showing up even later,) parents didn't go back to their original behavior! (I think the daycare must not have charged enough. My daycare charges a $1/minute and I have to say that's motivating! Although I am more motivated by the embarrassment of being the last parent and of making my kid feel bad.) [Dave Neary pointed me to Luis Villa's post on this one.]
- Household chores. Motivation crowding theory cites a study that found that kids that were paid to mow the lawn would only mow the lawn if they were paid to mow it.
So the question is, can those studies be applied to open source software? I think so, although we'll need to look at the intrinsic motivations driving developers and the external rewards they get. I'll be sharing more of my research in future blog posts.
Stormy: you might also want to look at this paper that Asay linked to. I haven’t had time to read it myself, but it tries to actually measure this impact on open source development, not just generically. If you do have time to read it, please do blog your impressions :)
Thanks for the pointer! I’ll get right on it.
A former client of mine paid one of the developers to work extra on nights and weekends. The other developers didn’t realize this person was being compensated for this extra time. Word got out, of course, and the developers said it wasn’t fair - they, too, were working many extra nights and weekends without extra pay. The manager said he’d pay them the extra for future night and weekend work, but not for the previous extra time. The developers decided, instead, they’d start going home at 5pm, and to heck with the extra hours. Schedules began to slip, a lot, since this manager had included all their extra time in his plan. The secret, unequal compensation plan said a lot about this manager, and the development organization now has a lot of turnover.
Celeste,
I can definitely see that - it would be “unfair” and most developers I know are somewhat idealistic and definitely fans of fair in the sense that rewards should be given out for results or effort or talent.
Stormy
My view about this behavior is that it has to do with helping others versus selfish behavior. When someone feels they are genuinely helping someone else, they feel good, they will continue to feel good every time they remember that they did it, and they will be more likely to do it in the future. Selfish behavior does not have this same quality, it is more momentary. Selfish rewards close you off from the reality that you are a part of a larger community.
That’s why I think the Swiss survey found that more people answered positively to storing the nuclear waste in their town when the researchers appealed to the person’s sense that they are part of a larger community. The townspeople probably felt they would be helping their fellow citizens by allowing the waste in their town; they can see that it isnt just about their personal preferences anymore.
It’s the same when open source works well — when programmers can see that they are helping others, this is the greatest reward that they can get. The more this is emphasized in an open source project, the better off the project will be. When you bring in selfish rewards, it tends to take away the feeling of community.
An open source project could also be started by someone who wants fame, or money, without also wanting to help others. In this case I would guess the project would not be very successful. Sure, its fine to make a living by doing it, or to achieve fame, but the primary motivation should be to help others if you want your project to succeed.
This is all very well, though I’d object to the use of ’should’ in ‘but the primary motivation should be to help others if you want your project to succeed’.
If you want open source software to be developed by and for amateurs who are too geeky to get a life, then fine. But I think it will implode on itself after a while if that’s all there is to it - if you want real effort dotting Is, crossing Ts and making open source actually compete with alternatives for disinterested non-technical users, then you’ll have to make it acceptable for payment to be offered and received, because some aspects of the software delivery process as a whole are definitely Work, not Play. And some software isn’t glamorous.
If I had to pick important bits of software to me, it wouldn’t be instant messaging, multimedia or fancy browsing - it would be payroll and customer invoicing.
While I think there’s a lot of people working on glamorous software, I think there are also a lot of people working on the not so glamorous pieces - for free! I think “important to me” != glamorous.
Hi Stormy,
There is a book which mentions, among others, the Israeli daycare case, and which addresses directly the question of motivations, which I hadn’t read at the time, but since picked up & devoured in a few hours: “Freakonomics” by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner. It also has pointers to several other interesting and relevant stories related to cash as a motivator.
The nut of the issue is that if you’re going to use cash as a motivator, then you’d better make it worth the effort, and be prepared to lose the motivation of people for whom cash is/was not the primary motivator if they’re not paid.
Cheers,
Dave.