Daniel Pink on the surprising science of motivation

“As long as the task involved only mechanical skill, bonuses worked as they would be expected: the higher the pay, the better the performance.”

"But once the task called for “even rudimentary cognitive skill,” a larger reward “led to poorer performance.”

“In eight of the nine tasks we examined across the three experiments, higher incentives led to worse performance.”

Large Stakes and Big Mistakes
Working Paper 05-11
by Dan Ariely, Uri Gneezy, George Loewenstein, and Nina Mazar