Department of Management, BSS, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark.
PLoS One. 2020 Oct 21;15(10):e0240291. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0240291. eCollection 2020.
Classic micro-economic and psychology theories propose different implications of monetary incentives on performance. Empirical studies in sports settings show that athletes generally perform worse when the stakes are higher, while a range of lab studies involving cognitively demanding tasks have led to diverging results, supporting positive, negative and null-effects of higher (vs. lower) stakes. In order to further investigate this issue, we present a pre-registered, randomized, controlled trial of 149 participants solving both anagrams and math addition tasks. We do not find a statistically significant effect of the size of the reward on neither performance, self-reported effort nor intrinsic motivation. We propose that future studies should contrast the potential impact of rewards on different kinds of task, e.g. compare tasks that solely require cognitive effort vs. tasks that require motor skills, as in sports.
经典微观经济学和心理学理论对金钱激励对绩效的影响提出了不同的假设。在体育环境下的实证研究表明，当赌注更高时，运动员的表现通常会更差，而一系列涉及认知要求任务的实验室研究得出了不同的结果，支持更高（相对于更低）赌注的正、负和零效应。为了进一步研究这个问题，我们对 149 名参与者进行了预先注册的随机对照试验，让他们解决字谜和数学加法任务。我们没有发现奖励大小对表现、自我报告的努力或内在动机没有统计学上的显著影响。我们提出，未来的研究应该对比奖励对不同类型任务的潜在影响，例如，比较仅需要认知努力的任务与需要运动技能的任务，就像在体育中一样。
