Science confirms it: People are not pets

This is one of those findings in psychology that&#x27;s always seemed suspect to me.<p>What is salary if not a reward for work done on an ongoing basis? The vast majority of people would not do their jobs for free; they need that reward for them to keep doing it.<p>Similarly, I&#x27;ve tried harder at my current job than at previous jobs because the performance review, promotion process, and merit bonus&#x2F;raise programs are much more rigorous. My employer hasn&#x27;t gotten more and better work out of me as a result, and I&#x27;ve gotten better promotions and raises as a result too. Is this not a &quot;reward&quot;? I&#x27;ve seen, with my own eyes, coworkers putting in long hours at crunch time for a shot at a better annual bonus or higher chances of promotion (at companies where effort is fairly evaluated and rewarded).<p>What possible levers does a business have to pull to entice performance from its employees if not monetary compensation? Every other reward in lieu of money is (correctly) perceived to deeply cynical. Businesses exists to make money, and if you make them more money but instead of sharing that with you they just give you something intangible like praise, then they&#x27;re ripping you off.<p>If effort can&#x27;t be rewarded with money, then shouldn&#x27;t the entire economy collapse? That is the basis of capitalism after all. Something seems to be deeply off with these studies.

Yeah, well thanks for stating the obvious...<p>When you have kids you come very quickly to the realization that rewards aren&#x27;t a mean to efficiently motivate. However intrisic motivation is exaclty this: intrinsic.<p>So what? Unless you can do Inception in your kids dreams to push them to realise that what you ask them is not what you want but what&#x27;s actually good for them, you&#x27;re bond to use rewards because that&#x27;s the only thing that actually works.<p>Intrinsic motivation comes from the realization that you must do something for good (your own or others, but in the end it&#x27;s only for you... but that&#x27;s another ethical topic).

So If I didn’t misread, as long as you continously give the incentive, everythings fine and still works as intended? For teaching this is ofc dumb and explicitly not the outcome you want, but for eg sales incentives, it works as expected (and probably much easier to do than convince your marketers that they really do want to sell that product at the highest price for the benefit of everyone and everything)