24th March 2011 - Human Exoskeletons & Motivation

• Human Exoskeletons - TED talk of the day. Yesterday I was wondering about replacement arms and today I see this which gives hope to those who can not walk.  It is an exoskeleton which for the military, allows people to carry 200lb over long distances. It has extra 'legs' attached to the person's legs to take the load, but it does not limit movement.  There is also, more exciting to me, an exoskeleton, which is just put on externally allowing someone to walk.  They show a lady who is paralysed from the pelvis down using this to walk.  I wonder how much movement is necessary to be able to use this.[TEDtalk] [Longer TEDtalk on eLEGS]

• Motivation - What motivates us to do well at creative tasks? Money? Nope, mastering things and choosing what we do ourselves.  Research has shown that larger financial rewards lead to weaker performances when creativity and ideas are required.  It seems that so long as money isn't an issue, people work better when the motivation is intrinsic. Different parts of the brain are responsible for external and internal motivations  and their effects on our behaviour are very different.[Animated presentation on money & motivation]
  Update: New Scientist
  

  But the work of Deci and others suggests the problem with bonuses runs far deeper than poor scheme design or cheating. In 1971, he asked students to solve puzzles, with some receiving cash prizes for doing well and others getting nothing. Deci found those offered cash were less likely to keep working on puzzles after they had done enough to get paid.
  
  Two years later, a team led by Mark Lepper of Stanford University, California, asked children aged between 3 and 5 years old to draw with felt-tip pens. Some were told they would receive a special ribbon as a prize for doing so, and duly received it. These children were less likely to choose to draw with felt-tip pens when they were later given a free choice of activities. No such effect was seen with children who were not offered a reward, whether they subsequently received an unexpected one or not (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, vol 28, p 129).
  
  These studies suggest that offering rewards can stop people doing things for the sheer joy of it, an idea known as the overjustification effect. This was the basis for a series of books by Kohn in which he argues that rewarding children, students and workers with grades, incentives and other "bribes" leads to inferior work in the long run.
  
  Those who believe in the power of bonuses fail to distinguish between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation - wanting to do something because you like it in its own right versus doing something because you want the reward, Kohn says. "It's not just that these two are different, it's that they are often inversely related. The more you reward people for doing something, the more their intrinsic motivation tends to decline."
  
  A "do this and get that" approach might improve performance in the short term, but over longer periods it will always fail, Kohn says, as it turns play into work and work into drudgery. Bonus recipients inevitably play safe, become less creative, collaborate less and feel less valued, he adds.