What drives us to take certain actions over others?
What forces influence our choices on a personal and group level?
Incentives.
Reward, punishment, gains and losses shape behaviour.
Give someone a sufficently compelling reason to do the thing – or a good reason to avoid not doing it – and they’ll probably do it.
This doesn’t hold true for everyone, everywhere, all the time. Individuals are individual: there’s no guaranteed way to tell how a single person will respond to any effort to shape their behaviour…
But across a large enough sample size if actors/interactions/scenarios, we see this play out reliably enough to make it worth keeping in mind.
The interesting thing about incentives is that we don’t always see them as such.
- Taxes.
- Government policy spanning topics like economics, housing, and investment.
- Setting targets for the people we lead.
- Putting underperformers on PIPs.
- Cajoling a family member to make better choices.
- Motivating ourselves to do something we’ve been avoiding.
Each of these are examples of incentives at work.
We might use different language to describe them, but the result is the same:
Systems of reward and punishment are used to control our actions.
When we operate entirely in a vacuum – no consequence to our actions, no preferred path – our choices are random.
Randomness creates chaos.
Given our individual and collective need to exercise control (the appearance of it, anyway), this is unacceptable.
We’re not content to let things pan out as they may. We have a vision for how this should go. And we’ll wield whatever tools we have at our disposal to bring that vision to life.
Whether we do it consciously or subconsciously, we weaponise our need for certainty by inflicting reward and punishment in equal measure to anyone – even ourselves – we think deserves it.
We don’t always know we’re doing this. We don’t always know this is being done to us. And when we’re unaware of what’s happening, it’s easy to feel confused.
But when we see the role of incentives for what they are, this changes.
Every system is perfectly optimised to produce the results it produces.
If that system is produces results we don’t want, that’s not a failure of the system itself. It’s a question of design.
The exact same principle applies to our choices.
Whatever behaviour is emerging…
Whatever decision is made…
Whatever path is taken…
The incentives have made it so.
We act in accordance with incentives.
Reward and punishment are powerful tools. But they only work when they’re applied in the right way.
If we’re not getting the outcomes we want, it’s worth getting clear about this.
An incentive that’s not compelling enough to move someone is no incentive at all.
And even if an incentive is unspoken, it can still be the factor driving our movement.