If you want to incenvitize some behavior you can offer an extrinsic reward. Certainty in an extrinsic reward causes overjustification.
An uncertain extrinsic reward seems to mute the overjustification effect increasing the intrinsic motivation within the process, while still affording some of the incentives that you're looking for.
When we are outside of the process we weight the certain reward more highly than the uncertain reward. But a certainty in the reward means we lose our intrinsic motivation within the process and replace it with direct motivation towards the goal, for instance you might stop doing something because it's not worth the 2 dollars you'll get. An uncertain reward lets us stay motivated within the process. For instance, something might not be worth the 1 or 2 dollars you will get, but you might be motivated to stick it out till the end just to see whether you'll get 1 or 2, or because it's fun, and you're not necessarily going to get 2 anyways.
When you can abstract a process down to "Do x, get y" your enjoyment of x can get caught up in your value of y. When it is "Do x, get y or get z" then your enjoyment of x might stand alone, because you can't relate it specifically to y or z.
If it's worth it to do x for y, and z is more, then you might be interested to see if you get z, so you be excited to do x to see if you will win z, and be satisfied with y if you don't.
If it's only worth it to do x for z, then you have to take into account that you might get y. If you might get y, and it's not worth it, then there's some cognitive dissonance, one way for you to resolve that is to say that you just enjoy x even if you do get the lesser prize.
Either way, you're not thinking about abstracting the whole process into a routine to get y. It's either y with occasional exciting bonuses, or it's doing x because it's enjoyable and sometimes getting fair compensation for your time.
Think of it this way. Think of an employee paid hourly, $20/hr. They can come to work for as long as they want, and they have a budget of $400/week. They work 20 hours a week, except on the odd occasion when they want to save a bit more or splurge.
Then consider an employee paid hourly $15/hr. They can also come to work for as long as they want and have a budget of $400/week. The difference is there's a 25% chance every hour that they will get an extra $20. They're going to feel differently, If they get $400 in their first 15 hours, they might be excited. They might keep working and make themselves a bit of extra cash, or they might go home early. If they don't make the bonus at all, they know that's a possibility and they will work the 27 hours they need to make ends meet.
On average both employees need to work the same amount to reach their budget. The second employee is more likely going to work more than 20 hours per week on average. They've already resigned to the fact that 27 hour weeks might happen, but that will rarely happen. They will justify that $15/hr is OK. The rest is gravy. They're lucky to get it. The job's not so bad at $15/hr. The bonus is nice but not something you have to live off of, 27 hours isn't a bad work week in the worst case.
Both employees have the same average wage, but I think the second is more likely to work more hours over the course of a year. If the budget of the first person were to shrink or grow, they would more directly adjust their schedule than the second employee would. If the second employee were to actually like their job, they would be more motivated to go to it just to see if they could get more bonus regardless of what was needed.
In some ways you ironically feel more in control of the latter scenario. I don't need to go into work this week (because I earned a lot of bonus) but I want to because I choose to see if I can earn more bonus, if not, the job's not so bad anyways.
On the other hand it's easier to sell someone on the idea of a job that's $20/hr than a job that's $15/hr and randomly $35/hr.
I think you've certainly got under the skin of the effect with these thoughts. As you say, the hardest thing might be the initial requirement to convince practitioners of whatever system you're designing to not focus on the reward to the extent that it dissuades them from opting in in the first place.
Thanks for the comments. Ps the content on coglode.com certainly has application to areas like marketing, but it's more broad than that, with a focus on product and behaviour system design. Knowing how we think is critical to help promote any kind of behaviour: charitable donation, greater health and wellness, stronger loyalty and customer satisfaction, achieving life goals and so forth.
Would be great to hear if ou guys have any ideas on what we could improve.
There is built-in code editor: http://joxi.ru/v3lNUxjKTJA4Eous4Gs Right now, it lags sometimes, but we'll migrate to Meteor 0.8 and this issue will be resolved. Also, at the bottom of editor, there is a link to http://wiki.pintask.me/wiki/How_to_write_an_extension with some info to get started. If you have specific questions, please reach me: Denis.D.Gorbachev at gmail
"Even more people are getting their butts of the beds every morning, going to the job they hate, just to support the basic needs."
And you think that programmers don't? I work as a badly underpaid php developer and have slept on a couch in a ~35m² single-room apartment for the last few years. I handed in my resignation this week, because this job causes depressions that make me borderline suicidal. I'll have to live off of state welfare, if I can get it, if I don't then I'll be homeless, but I just can't take this shit anymore, so I'm taking the plunge and hope for the best.
For every well-paid and -treated programmer there are a whole bunch of underpaid and ill-treated ones. Besides, what's so wrong about not wanting to work? You as someone with a good grip on what technology can do should see that we could've started to automate the production of things needed for basic survival (food, shelter, energy…) decades, if not even longer, ago.
As far as I can tell, programmers have far greater chances to end up with depression or burnout than most other jobs, so please don't act like it's all sunshine and unicorn farts for all of us.
Most people will just shrug it off as "The logo is ugly, so what?". But please consider this:
The thing is not that the logos are ugly; The thing is that GNU is spectacularly bad at (graphic) design. Design might not be important for gcc, but if a project has no one with design expertise, their [G]UIs will (and do) suck. You can see this for instance with just about any open source crypto application ever.
You know, I'd post a comment on there but I always get that really useless "Your comment submission failed for the following reasons: Text entered was wrong. Try again."-shit.
Doesn't really paint a good picture of perl if something that simple already fails…
Yep,yep. I misread the headline and read this hoping for insights from Troy McClure. I really don't care about how a person on Twitter was offended by a tweet. I learned nothing from this blog post.
You are doing the same thing by assuming that Snowden's influence is as vast as that of Christianity.
It's not "just" about the internet, or even IT - it's the revelation that we are forced into a panopticon, that all of us are spied upon.
Christianity has nothing real at it's base. It's just mythology. Yeah, there are a huge number of people who "believe" it.
In contrast IT shapes just about every damn aspect of our lives. Just about all financial transfers, personal communication, news, etc. etc. are stored on computers of some shape and travel the internet. The internet has enabled the arab spring, international scientific collaboration and many, many, MANY other things.
As a little example of the real impact the Snowden Leaks have, just look at the number of Christians[1] vs. the number of cellphone subscriptions[2]: There's about 2 billion Christians. And about 6 billion cellphone subscriptions. So please don't go yapping about how fucking important some half-dead fairytale is.
Addendum: Please also note, that the Pope doesn't even represent all Christians but just catholic Christians, of which there's even less than a billion.
Meanwhile, the Snowden Leaks are important to just about everyone. The only people who are unaffacted by this are people who live without any computers.
But hey, if you live with some indigenous tribe in the jungle, you're (probably) in the clear; Until realtime surveillance with satellites becomes cheap enough at least.
>Christianity has nothing real at it's base. It's just mythology. Yeah, there are a huge number of people who "believe" it.
It has historical relevance, the influence of the church throughout history not the stories in the Bible. AKA Inquisition, influence on the Monarchies, crusades, etc.
It has a huge base of believers who listen to a clergy man every Sunday and some (not all) take to heart what he has to say, this is passed down from the head of the church (the pope and cardinals).
It has huge political sway. Just like the revelations that Snowden did.
In contrast, Snowden revealed something of great importance to the First World (which is probably why you are all fired up about it). He pointed out something that really could be disastrous for our nation. However, the adoption and acceptance of Homosexuals in the third world is also important and Francis could have an affect on that.
>There's about 2 billion Christians. And about 6 billion cellphone subscriptions.
And if the poles are to be believed only 50% of Americans care about this. I can guarantee you there are less Bolivians and Haitians (who have cell phones too) that give a crap about NSA Surveillance. Rest assured, I'm in the percentage that cares, but I'm also not going to write off the contributions of Pope Francis. But this isn't as relevant to EVERYONE as you seem to assume. Also, these are very bad metrics for the affect EITHER Snowden or Francis will have on history.
>So please don't go yapping about how fucking important some half-dead fairytale is.
This is inappropriate and you were being a dick. Yapping? Seriously? I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you are just being silly here...
Edit: TL;DR; Even if you take away the belief system in the Catholic church and the Pope has an affect on a huge number of human beings, and that is really what this is all about...
Even if you take away the belief system in the Catholic church and the Pope has an affect on a huge number of human beings, and that is really what this is all about...
Yes, and it's about how many people are affected, not how many "care" about it.
You don't have to care about the Leaks in order for the revealed programs to affect you. And it's not only the first world, as every spy agency freely siphons any and all "foreign" data they can get their hands on. So third world countries are considered fair game by pretty much all spy agencies and are obviously spied upon (German authorities for instance often repeat the mantra that they spy on Afghani data traffic because terror). Even now the largest part of the third world population has a cellphone and is getting ever more connected.
The catholic church might have a good deal of political sway and lots of followers, but the Snowden Leaks affect as close to 100% of the global population as you'll ever get.
Edit: I'd also like to point out that the influence of the church is dwindling while the influence of digital communication is going to continue to soar.
Shouldn't I be compelled to read all of it if the claims were true? :P