How well does extrinsic motivation help us perform? NPR recently had another interesting interview with Dan Ariely where he talked about how rewards, cash bonuses in this case, affect performance.
It turns out that while bonuses increase people’s desire to perform better, people actually perform worse, probably because of the increased stress.
Jonah Lehrer actually suggests that this also applies to negative rewards. He suggests the engineers trying to cap the oil leaking beneath the Gulf of Mexico should take more time off because pressure from powerful incentives reduces our ability to think creatively.
So think about what this implies for high-stakes testing.