Fredrik Eriksson wrote:
> On Sun, 23 May 2010 19:08:42 +0200, Jim Charter <jrc### [at] msncom> wrote:
>> People paid higher rewards were simply no different from people 
>> offered lower rewards?  Or people doing such tasks who were paid lower 
>> rewards performed better than those being paid higher?
> 
> The latter.
> 
> 
> 
>> The reward high or low was not at all attached to production?
> 
> There was a negative correlation between reward and performance.
> 
> 
> 
No, in fact he flips it.

First he says of the study with the students that to
'incentivise performance'
'there were three levels of reward'
'if you did pretty well you got a small reward, medium well you got a 
medium reward, and really well you got a large cash prize'

so reward is attached to performance, the reward amount follows 
performance, depends on performance

then he goes on to summarize the results in the opposite order

for 'mechanical skills the higher the pay the better the performance'
for 'rudimentary cognitive skills the higher reward led to poorer 
performance'

so now he has performance following the reward, performance depending on 
reward



then he describes second study as being set up 'roughly as follows'

'small performance, low performance, two weeks salary,
medium performance, about a months salary,
high performance, about two months salary'
so he leaves the order a little vague though he does list performance 
then reward, and again he describes the 'incentives' as 'rewards' 
suggesting it follows on performance
then again he describes the results in the opposite order, that the 
rewards 'led' to performance.
at this point a lot depends on the word 'offer' which can be ambiguous 
in the context but still we have the word 'reward'
those 'offered medium reward do no better than those offered small 
reward, but the people offered the top reward, they did worst of all'

this is the sleight of hand I am bothered by.

who was offered what? was everyone competing for top rewards?  i don't 
get it.

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