The talk opened with a confession. In the late 1980s, Dan Pink said, in a moment of youthful indiscretion, he had gone to law school. He had graduated in the part of his class “that made the top 90% possible,” and never practiced a day.
It was July 24, 2009, at TEDGlobal. Against the advice of his own wife, Pink said, he was going to dust off what was left of his legal skills. “I don’t want to tell you a story. I want to make a case.”
His first exhibit was a candle, some thumbtacks and some matches. Attach the candle to the wall so the wax doesn’t drip onto the table. He walked the audience through the usual failures, tacking the candle to the wall, melting its side to glue it on, and then the answer: the box the tacks came in is also a shelf.
Then he called his witness, a psychologist named Sam Glucksberg. Glucksberg had timed people on the puzzle. One group was told the times would set norms. The other was offered $5 for finishing in the fastest quarter and $20 for the fastest of all. The group playing for money, Pink said, took three and a half minutes longer on average.
He also gave the jury the half of the result that complicated it. Glucksberg had run the puzzle a second way, with the tacks already out of the box. This time, Pink said, the group offered money “kicked the other group’s butt.” If-then rewards work well, he argued, where there is a simple set of rules and a clear destination. “Rewards, by their very nature, narrow our focus.” On the real candle problem, the solution was on the periphery.
From there Pink widened the case. Contingent rewards, he told the room, worked “in some circumstances,” but for a lot of tasks they did nothing or did harm, and this was “one of the most robust findings in social science, and also one of the most ignored.” What should replace them, he argued, was autonomy, mastery and purpose. He closed like a lawyer: “I rest my case.”
By TED’s count, the talk has been viewed more than 32 million times.
On the candle problem, the jury had heard about one experiment, which Pink said “has been replicated over and over again for nearly 40 years.” In 2012 and 2013, three economists, Joachim Ramm, Sigve Tjøtta and Gaute Torsvik, put the hard version of the puzzle in front of 79 students at the University of Bergen, about half of them competing for a cash prize. The paid students were a little slower and solved it a little less often, but the differences were small and not statistically significant. Glucksberg’s subjects had all been men. The Bergen sample mixed men and women, and the economists found no significant difference between how the two responded to the prize.
“We failed to replicate the results in Glucksberg (1962),” they wrote.