If You Pay A Mouse To Eat A Cookie

Well be made it through November. One month left of this pandemic year. Let’s make the most of it.

Yesterday, I read a fascinating piece over at MIT Press about motivation. The question the researchers are trying to determine is how pay messes with motivation. So, naturally, they decided to pay people to eat cookies.

The result? Yes, people STILL enjoyed eating the cookie while they’re getting paid to do it, but the pay REDUCES future cookie enjoyment without monetary compensation.

While this will undoubtedly be turned into some weird diet plan (since everything is turned into a weird diet plan), the researchers are obviously trying to get to the deeper interaction between things we like to do and getting paid to do it.

This does raise interesting questions. Mark Twain’s old maxim is “find a job you enjoy doing, and you will never have to work a day in your life.” But if you get paid to do it, does that mean you’ll never enjoy doing it outside of getting paid for it?

We certainly see anecdotal evidence of this. The chef who won’t cook for himself. The game designer who won’t play games once she’s done with work. The research is pointing to it being more than anecdotal.

This, then, screws with the current prevailing thinking in the business world. If you give someone a bonus for doing a good job, wouldn’t that mean that they’re less motivated to do that good job without getting that bonus?

It certainly seems to indicate that.

Does this go even deeper? Is it just monetary rewards? Or does any external reward system, such as good grades, pats on the back, kudos, etc., actually make things worse?

Yeah, that’s definitely worth investigating.

It’s pretty counter to everything our culture likes to focus on with the reward system. I obviously don’t have the answer to make it better, but figuring out how to allow things to be their on reward and let the money just happen seems like a path worth exploring.

Now if you can figure out how to get that to work moving along while keeping a robust economy chugging along, you’re gonna be a really popular speaker at every corporate event across the nation.

The Links

• My latest: Hey, it was Thanksgiving. I took a week off.
• A 34 year old game ported to a Japanese only PC from the ’80s and sold on 3.5 inch floppy disks all newly released in 2021? Sign me up.
• My daughter and I have been watching the Studio Ghibli films on HBO Max…and I have to say, I’m not sold on this new one. The CGI looks…can I just say bad? It looks bad. I think the original Toy Story looked better.

Service Dog Update

While I was working at home, I heard a sound downstairs like marbles rolling everywhere. I’ve learned with a puppy that weird, unexplained sounds are never a good thing.

I ran downstairs to find the dog laying calmly down in his favorite spot in front of the house. The kids were also working on their computers, doing school work (or at least pretending to be). The cat was nowhere to be seen (she was probably hiding under our bed waiting for an unsuspecting victim to walk by, her new favorite hobby).

Something caused the sound, though. So I scoured the dining room.

And there it was. From Halloween, we had a big bag of Starbursts in a Ziplock, which had fallen on the ground and spilled everywhere.

How did it happen? Was it precariously placed? Do we have ghosts moving thing?

I decided to finish the investigation…and checked the calmly laying dog’s mouth. And low and behold, a wrapped Starburst lay hidden there, likely stored until the evil food taker left the room.

Worst of all, it was an orange one. It’s the the dog didn’t even know he chose a bad flavor.