Criatividade e Incentivos

Incentives & creativity, por Chris Dillow:

Incentives matter" is a cliche. But is it true? One new paper suggests not. German researchers got subjects to find words from a set of letters - a task requiring some creativity and inventiveness - and found that their ability to do so was barely affected at all by whether they were paid a flat fee, by results or by giving a prize to the better solvers. They concluded:

Neither on the aggregate nor on the individual level do we find effects of incentives on performance.

This is consistent with a claim made by Daniel Pink - that financial incentives can actually be bad for creativity:

For more right-brained undertakings - those that demand flexible problem-solving, inventiveness or conceptual understanding - contingent rewards can be dangerous. Rewarded subjects often have a harder time seeing the periphery and crafting original solutions. (Drive, p 46)

Research by Theresa Amabile, summarised here (pdf), corroborates this.

All this, though, runs into a question. Tim Harford and Robert Allen say that the industrial revolution - the burst of creativity that most transformed human life - occured in Britain because of incentives; high wages gave inventors an incentive to look for labour-saving machines. How can we reconcile this with the laboratory evidence that incentives don't spur creativity? I suspect there are two ways.

One is that attention (pdf) is a scarce resource, and incentives act to draw our attention to problems. So, for example, England's high wages in the 18th century drew attention towards the question of how to save labour costs, in a way that didn't happen in lower-wage nations.

Secondly, there's a selection effect. Incentives might not motivate a given group of people to be creative, but they might change the composition of that group, by - at the margin - attracting some able people to the task.

Sintetizando, eu diria que os incentivos talvez não afectem a produtividade do trabalho criativo (o número de ideias que se tem por cada hora passada a pensar) mas afectam a quantidade de trabalho criativo efectuado (o número total de horas passadas a pensar), e assim sempre afectam a produção total de ideias.

Aliás, há uma coisa que eu acho muito dúbia naqueles testes de "pensamento divergente" que se fazem para ver se uma pessoa é "criativa", do estilo "tens dez minutos para dares todos os usos possíveis que te lembrares para este objecto" - a criatividade de uma pessoa é largamente dada por "ideias que essa pessoa tem por hora x horas que essa pessoa passa a pensar"; mas nesses testes o tempo para pensar é um dado, logo não captam o que, no mundo real, talvez seja um dos principais determinantes da criatividade - a inclinação pessoal para passar (ou não) muito tempo com "a cabeça na lua".