OR: The secret geniuses of Wisconsin

Startling differences between humans and jukeboxes

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Similarly, when you survey people about what motivates them at work, they go “Feeling good about myself! Having freedom, the respect of my coworkers, and opportunities to develop my skills, learn things, and succeed!” When you survey people about what motivates others, they go, “Money and job security!” In another survey, people claimed that they value high-level needs (e.g., finding meaning in life) more than other people do.3

I’m saying “people” here as if I wasn’t one of them, but I would have agreed with all of the above. It was only saying it out loud that made me realize how cynical my theory of human motivation was, and that I applied it to everyone but myself. Yikes!

It’s not that hard to give people skills. It’s way harder to give them interests.

The best way to use incentives, then, is to:

  1. find the people who already want what you want
  1. help them survive

in a department where an internal survey revealed low morale among the graduate students. A town hall was convened to investigate the issue. The students knew that one of the biggest problems was that a handful of professors terrorize and neglect their underlings, and the fastest way to fix this would be to put those faculty members on an ice floe and push it out to sea. This, of course, was difficult to bring up (some of those faculty members were in the room), and so instead we talked about minor bureaucratic reforms like whether there should be some training for advisors, or whether bad advisors should have fewer opportunities to admit students. Nobody could name who these mysterious bad advisors were, of course, so even these piddling suggestions went nowhere.

If you hire someone based on the shininess of their CV and then hope that, somehow, the employee handbook will show them how to also be a good person and not just a prolific paper-producer, you’re going to end up with a department full of sad graduate students.

If you’re writing a constitution or a code of conduct, by all means, do a good job. But if you’re counting on something like “SUBSECTION 3A: Being evil is not allowed” to stop people from being evil, or if you think Roberts Rules of Order are going to turn an insecure despot into an enlightened ruler, well, strap in for some Dark Ages and some bad improv.

discovering your inner motivations takes time and experience, and we gum up the process with lots of strong opinions about what should motivate us.

If you believe that people need to be treated like jukeboxes or secret criminals, you are accepting the behaviorist premise that we need to put people inside a giant [operant conditioning chamber](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operant_conditioning_chamber#:~:text=An operant conditioning chamber (also,graduate student at Harvard University.) that dispenses food pellets for good behavior and electric shocks for bad behavior.