With apologies to Frederick Herzberg:  “One more time, how do you motivate teachers?”

More than thirty years ago, Herzberg wrote a short article in the Harvard Business Review trying to dispel dominant myths about how to motivate employees:

“Let us consider motivation. If I say to you, “Do this for me or the company, and in return I will give you a reward, an incentive, more status, a promotion, all the quid pro quos that exist in the industrial organization”, am I motivating you?

The overwhelming opinion I receive from management people is, “Yes, this is motivation.” I have a year-old Schnauzer. When it was a small puppy and I wanted to move it, I kicked it in the rear and it moved. Now that I have finished its obedience training, I hold up a dog biscuit when I want the Schnauzer to move. In this instance, who is motivated – I or the dog? The dog wants the biscuit, but it is I who want it to move. Again, I am the one who is motivated, and the dog is the one who moves. In this instance all I did was apply KITA [a kick in the ass] frontally; I exerted a pull instead of a push. When industry wishes to use such positive KITAs, it has available an incredible number and variety of dog biscuits (jelly beans for humans) to wave in front of employees to get them to jump.”

This basic idea has been shown time and time again. Extrinsic rewards crowd out intrinsic rewards; pay-for-performance schemes don’t drive performance; contingent pay doesn’t motivate. But don’t think that the myth doesn’t endure.

This week, it showed up in Manhattan, where one charter school has decided to splash out on $125k salaries for its teachers, hoping that oversize salaries will result in quality education. The teachers will teach bigger classes (30 students) and shoulder more administrative burdens and be supported by fewer social workers (one or two for a school of 480 low-income students from Washington Heights) But they’ll deliver Great Education! Why? Because they get huge paycheques. No, really:

“A New York City charter school set to open in 2009 in Washington Heights will test one of the most fundamental questions in education: Whether significantly higher pay for teachers is the key to improving schools.

The school, which will run from fifth to eighth grades, is promising to pay teachers $125,000, plus a potential bonus based on schoolwide performance. “

Don’t get me wrong. Teachers are underpaid as a group, especially in the United States, where in some districts they have all the earning power of a maquiladora worker. But if this scheme of huge salaries and lousy conditions works out the way the school anticipates, I’ll eat my hat.

Photo: Jessamyn

… with bonus points for a narrator who sounds very much like Jack McBrayer. (via)

Link: The Agony Of Opportunity

I borrowed the title of this post from an article Charles Naquin conducted that has inspired a small study I’m currently working on.  Naquin found that in negotiation, having more negotiable issues leads to better outcomes (because people can logroll issues for joint gain), but that these objectively better outcomes lead to less individual satisfaction.

This finding probably wouldn’t surprise the consumer-behaviour folks.  Sheena Iyengar at Columbia has been doing research on this topic for years, with similar results.  Give someone a choice between twenty varieties of jam, and they wind up less satisfied with their choice than someone who had only six flavours to choose from.  When we have a pile of possible outcomes, we’re prone to mulling over counterfactual thoughts about what might have been.  It holds for jam, and it holds for negotiations.

One recently-discovered solution is to help people chunk their options into categories.  This makes intuitive sense, because it helps refine an overwhelming awareness set into a more manageable choice set.  But the interesting, shake-your-head-at-our-hilarious-irrationality finding is this one:

Now Iyengar has published a new study showing that one way to combat the effects of excessive choice is to group items into categories. It turns out that even useless categories make people happier with their choices…. students who chose from a coffee menu liked their choices better when the menu grouped the coffees into categories, even if the names were meaningless — for example, “Lola’s.”

“It’s 1975 And This Man Is About To Show You The Future” (via)

Link: Fibbing easier through e-mail

The Globe and Mail reports on a study by Naquin, Kurtzberg and Belkin that will be presented in a couple weeks at the Academy meetings in Anaheim:

“Have you ever lied in an e-mail?

Honestly, you’re not alone. A U.S. study released Thursday shows e-mail is much more conducive to telling falsehoods than using old-fashioned pen and paper. Moreover, people feel more justified in doing it.”

‘In Theory, Economists Support McCain’

Link: From The Dept. Of Obvious But Uncomfortable Conclusions: Sampling Matters

Large-scale empirical studies often rely on historical data. How many times has that one dataset on the newspaper industry been used, for instance? Anyways, this month’s ASQ has an article that shows with simulations that the “selective sampling” of empirical settings (like pop ecology’s choice of large populations) can lead us to spurious conclusions.

Obama, crushing my dreams of rap stardom and reaffirming my commitment to graduate studies.

There’s a cool study published in this month’s OBHDP called “The effect of safe experience on a warnings’ impact: Sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll”.  It’s about the effect of warnings on risky behaviour.  In a series of studies, the authors found that

“… those who receive warnings before having (usually profitable or enjoyable) experience with risk taking exhibit less risk taking than those warned only after having such experience.”

The authors blame the primacy effect for the fact that we tend to ignore warnings.  Primacy effects decribe our propensity to attach more salience to the first stimulus in a series of stimuli.  For instance, if we’re given a list of ten options to choose from, we’ll pick the first one far more often than the second or third.  Here, it seems that we treat a warning and our own safe experiences like they were two items on a list.  If we experience the warning first, we weight it more heavily; if the safe experience comes first, we rely on it instead.

People who get early warnings engage in less risk-taking behaviour because of this primacy effect, which is amplified by virtue of what the authors call an “initial history” effect.  In other words, once we’ve chosen to forgo a risky behaviour once, that becomes our status-quo choice, and we tend to stick to it.

It is probably a function of the decade in which I was raised that reading this article triggered memories of ASTAR the Safety Robot.  I suppose it’s a good thing I saw that ad before I had a firsthand safe experience with cartwheeling through giant spinning metal buzzsaws.

Link: Why you should beware cars with lots of bumper stickers

The short version:  People with bumper stickers of all political bents seem to drive more aggressively.

Related: Bob Sutton describes a 1975 study that used bumper stickers, along with gun racks, as stimuli:

“[Researchers] manipulated the situation so that a pick-up truck at a stop light was slow to start moving after the light turned green.  They measured aggression by how quickly and how intensely the driver behind the truck started honking.  Turner and his colleagues varied two things about the pick-up truck: a gun rack with or without a gun, and two different bumper stickers. One said “friend” and the other said “vengeance.”  It is an interesting study because many people — including me — predict in advance that the gun and vengeance stickers would lead to do less honking, as the impatient driver waiting behind the truck might fear getting shot by the aggressive and armed person.  In fact, Turner and his colleagues found the opposite pattern. The drivers stuck behind the truck were more likely to honk when the driver had a gun, and even more likely to honk when he had both a gun and a vengeance bumper sticker!  One explanation is that aggression breeds aggression.”