Why Money, Power and Glory Are Bad Motivators
If all we want is money, power, and glory, the world becomes a sad place. Academic research provides solid evidence that the pursuit of these three things makes collaboration among humans miserable. For instance, it appears that students of management and economics, who make the pursuit of money and power their life's goal, are more greedy even before they start their studies, and that they become even more so over the course of their education. In behavioral research, first year economics students have been shown to be more likely to free-ride in public goods games: In one experiment , students could deposit money into a public account where it was multiplied and distributed to all participants, or keep their money in a private account, and still participate in the distribution of the public pool. First year graduate students in economics kept eighty percent of the money for themselves, and only put twenty percent into the public pool, compared to all other partic...
