Summary Of The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us

The film chosen for this analysis is “The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us” by Dan Pink. In this film, Pink discusses some of the common misconception about what it is that drives humans in their behaviors. One of the more commonly held beliefs is that if a person is provided with enough monetary incentives, their performance will dramatically improve. The main question behind the study was whether or not a reward would result in an increase of the desired behavior or if a smaller reward would result in a decrease in the desired behavior. The study began with a group of student who were given a series of challenges to complete. Such challenges ranged from memorizing strings of digits, spatial puzzles, solving word problems, and physical tasks such as being able to throw a …show more content…
The results from the experiment concluded that as long as the challenge involved performing mechanical skills, the rewards would work as expected. While on the other hand, the challenges that required more cognitive abilities, the higher rewards led to a poorer performance. The study then continued on in Madurai, India. This time the study would test if the higher value of money would result in a change in the observed outcome. The rewards were set up in a similar three level system. The lowest tier reward for a poor performance was equal to two weeks’ salary, the middle tier reward for an average performance was equal to one month’s salary, while the top tier reward was equal to two months’ salary. The end result of the study was that the average and lower tier rewards had little to no difference in the overall performance, while on the other hand the higher tier rewards had the worst in the overall performance. This study has been able to help conclude that while incentives were able to work with simple and straightforward challenges, they did not work with the more complicated